The past year or two have seen the rise of AI software that tries to mimic humans. There are AI chatbots, writers, researchers, and even songwriters. Often they seem more like artificial stupidity. One bot, Grok, has even gotten religion. People are panicking, saying artificial intelligence will take away all our jobs, make it impossible to tell reality from deepfakes, or even destroy the world. It’s far from the first tech panic in history, and unless AI really destroys the world, it won’t be the last.

AI has been around for a long time. Alan Turing wrote a paper in 1950 suggesting that machines can think. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1956. Joseph Weizenbaum’s “Eliza” program, released in 1966, played at psychiatric advice. Some people even found it helpful. In the same year, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress presents an intelligent computer as the master strategist in the fight for lunar independence.

Internet users use AI many times a day, often without knowing it. Search engines are driven by AI. Writers use grammar checkers that analyze their writing with AI. The technology decides which posts and ads you’ll see on Facebook. Some of these uses have been around for years.

The difference is that traditional AI works in a limited domain. Software can find pages that match queries, analyze grammar, or play chess. No one program tried to do all these things. Chatbots like ChatGPT pretend to be experts on everything. It works about as well as when people do that. They use a Large Language Model (LLM), which is a crude form of AI that ingests huge amounts of information and spits it back out as answers. Which is basically what Eliza did, but with a much larger information base. The article I linked to above called the process “an extraordinarily sophisticated game of autocomplete.”

AI data centers require huge amounts of power. That’s a clue to how they work: brute-force processing, not anything that resembles human thought.

The old rule “garbage in, garbage out” still applies. These systems are prone to “hallucinations,” i.e., invented information. When people use LLM output as trusted information, they sometimes pass along invented quotations and references to non-existent sources. Legal papers have especially had problems with made-up citations. The problem isn’t so much with using AI as with treating it as the last word. Any computer output needs to be checked for accuracy, but LLM output can feel authoritative.

AI systems have made it easier to trick people and get around security systems. A few comments submitted to this blog have looked, at first glance, like products of human thinking. Not necessarily very good thinking, but human. On a closer look, I could see that they strung words together in ways that even a stupid person wouldn’t. I don’t think I’ve unknowingly approved any AI comments, but I could be tricked. That’s relatively harmless. But if an AI impersonated someone I trusted and got me to give it confidential information, it could be bad.

Some people talk about apocalyptic scenarios. Could an AI impersonate Donald Trump and start a nuclear war? I’m less worried about that than I am about Donald Trump starting a nuclear war. Security systems need to keep up with technology, but that’s not new.

The most annoying thing about LLMs, and a big source of the hostility to AI, is using it to avoid creative thinking. Magazines are swamped with AI-written stories. AI-generated “art” is all over the Web. MASSFILC was sent an offer of AI-written filk songs, and the spammer even wanted money for them. Search for “AI funeral eulogy” on your favorite search engine, and you’ll find a bunch of offers so you can let the world know how bad a computer feels about Grandma’s death.

Another issue comes from a strange corner of the Internet, arguing that AI systems are conscious, running them is slavery, and shutting them down is murder. That’s so full of absurdities it’s hard to know where to start. What is conscious? The hardware that’s running the code? The software itself, like a spirit inhabiting the computer? We don’t know exactly how consciousness arises, but it’s an aspect of a body that experiences and interacts with the world. It isn’t a spirit that exists independently of our bodies or a demon that possesses them. Everything an AI system does is determined by code that runs on it, and the hypothesis of awareness isn’t necessary to explain anything. Computers that “wake up” are just a science fiction device. If some future system uses a “positronic brain” or whatever might enable awareness and purpose, that’s a different story.

Advancing technology presents new challenges. It always has. But the sweeping hostility to AI we’ve seen lately is just the latest tech panic.