Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)

LLMs are statistical models trained on human-generated text. They aren't the perfectly logical "machine brains" that Asimov and others imagined.

The upshot of this is that LLMs are quite good at the stuff that he thinks only humans will be able to do. What they aren't so good at (yet) is really rigorous reasoning, exactly the opposite of what 20th century people assumed.

What we used to think of as "AI" at one point in time becomes a mere "algorithm" or "automation" by another point in time. A lot of what Asimov predicted has come to pass, very much in the way he saw it. We just no longer think of it as "AI".

LLM's are just the latest form of "AI" that, for a change, doesn't quite fit Asimov's mold. Perhaps it's because they're being designed to replace humans in creative tasks rather than liberate humans to pursue them.

Exactly... as someone said " I need AI to do my laundary and dishes, while I can focus on art and creative stuff" ... But AI is doing the exact opposite, i.e creative stuff (drawing, poetry, coding, documents creation etc), while we are left to do the dishes/laundary.

As someone else said - maybe you haven't noticed but there's a machine washing your clothes, and there's a good chance it has at least some very basic AI in it.

It's been quite a while since anyone in the developed world has had to wash clothes by slapping them against a rock while standing in a river.

Obviously this is really wishing for domestic robots, not AI, and robots are at least a couple of levels of complexity beyond today's text/image/video GenAI.

There were already huge issues with corporatisation of creativity as "content" long before AI arrived. In fact one of our biggest problems is the complete collapse of the public's ability to imagine anything at all outside of corporate content channels.

AI can reinforce that. But - ironically - it can also be very good at subverting it.

> As someone else said - maybe you haven't noticed but there's a machine washing your clothes, and there's a good chance it has at least some very basic AI in it.

This really seems like an "akshually" argument to me...

Nobody is denying that there are dishwashers and washing machines, and that they are big time savers. But is it really a wonder what people are referring to when they say "I want AI to wash my dishes and do my laundry"? That is, I still spend hours doing the dishes and laundry every week, and I have a dishwasher and washing machine. But I still want something to fold my laundry, something that lets me just dump my dishes in the sink and have them come out clean, ideally put away in the cabinets.

> Obviously this is really wishing for domestic robots, not AI

I don't mean this to be an "every Internet argument is over semantics" example, but literally every company and team I know that's working on autonomous robots refers heavily to them as AI. And there is a fundamental difference between "old school" robotics, i.e robots following procedural instructions, and robots that use AI-based models, e.g https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gemini-robotics-brings... . I think it's doubly weird that you say that today's washing machines "has at least some very basic AI in it" (I think "very basic" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there...), but don't think AI refers to autonomous robots.