> The real question is how useful they are
No, it is not.
> and the answer "not at all" increasingly requires flat-earth levels of denial.
No, it does not.
For me, after ~25 years in the skeptics movement, I think the parallels with supplementary, complementary and alternative medicine are most useful.
I choose that term intentionally: its initials are S.C.A.M. and that's exactly what it is. As Tim Minchin and Alan Kay both noted, "we have a special term for alternative medicine that's been tested and shown to work. It's called 'medicine'."
If it worked, it'd be normal standard clinical medicine. But it doesn't work, and so it isn't.
And yet, SCAM is a multi-billion-dollar industry. People have ostensibly official qualifications like "ND", for "naturopathic doctor", even though that person is not a doctor and can't make you better from any kind of illness at all. Colleges teach it, millions use it, and yet, it does not work.
Which means we need to ask:
1. What does "It works! It's useful!" really mean?
2. How do we know it does not in fact work?
As a handy example, let's look at homeopathy.
Here's a quick list of things widely believed...
* It's traditional. It isn't. It was invented by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796.
* It's a kind of herbal medicine. It isn't. One widely-used ingredient is duck's liver ("Oscillococcinum"). Ducks are not herbs and neither are their livers.
* It's been proved to work. It hasn't.
We can go through the principles and prove it doesn't work even without going into a laboratory.
The principle is, "like cures like." A substance that causes symptoms like a given disease can treat that disease.
Fact: they can't.
Then we make that substance stronger by successive, succussive dilution.
Fact: it doesn't. That's why we say things are "watered down".
Succussive: you have to mix the diluted substance by banging the bottle against a copy of Hahnemann's book. Dude knew how to make money.
Fact: Dilution does not work.
That's why we call things "watered down." It makes them weaker.
Sufficiently high dilutions can be shown by statistics to have not a single molecule of the substance left, but that's OK because "water has a memory".
Fact: water does not have a memory.
We know from the principles it cannot work.
Relevance to AI: we know how the transformer algorithm works. It cannot think. Adding a few feedback loops for more plausible, but much more computationally expensive, answers does not miraculously add thinking, any more than banging a test tube of water and duck's liver magically mixes it better.
But people believe it, so it's been tested. It doesn't work. It doesn't work on people, or in vivo meaning when tested on animals, or in vitro meaning when tested in the lab on cell culture, or in silico which means in computational simulation.
*BUT!*
Most people get better from most things. This is called "reversion to the mean" and if it weren't so the first cold would have wiped out the cavemen.
What it can do, like all SCAM treatment, is make people feel better.
Being treated by a nice friendly doctor makes people feel better. It does not make them better -- it is only a state of mind.
That can sometimes marginally help gravely ill people rally, but only very rarely.
There is also the placebo effect, also much misunderstood.
This makes someone FEEL as if they'd had medicine if they think they've had medicine.
They do not get better. They just feel better for a bit. If they are ill, they remain ill. If they are dying, they still die.
But it might hurt less.
The placebo effect is very strong. Medicine from a person in a white coat works better than form the same person in street clothes.
Very big pills work better than smaller ones... but very small pills work better still, as a tiny pill suggests to people it's a very strong drug.
This is what "But AI works!" really means.
It makes people think they're doing less work -- in tests, they in fact do more, checking and fixing. Unless they don't check or fix, in which case, they are irresponsible fools.
It makes people think it can do amazing things because it can find prior art in its corpus they couldn't find -- or didn't look for, or know how to search for.
It does not save the need for skills.
Experienced practitioners can front-load the work with really detailed prompts which cover exceptions, edge cases, and things that novices don't know about. But the novices don't know that they don't know. (It enhances the illusion of competence. It helps the skilled more than it helps the unskilled, but neither realises, and it prevents the unskilled learning by trial and error. It reduces the supply of skilled workers.)
The reason AI works is the reason that people see the face of Jesus in slices of toast, as someone said recently.
