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.

The wits in robotics would say we already have domestic robots - we just call them dishwashers and washing machines. Once something becomes good enough to take the job completely, it gets the name and drops "robotic" - that's why we still have robotic vacuums.

I think that’s a bit silly. The reason we don’t commonly refer to a dishwasher as a robot isn’t because dishwashers exist and we only use “robot” for things that don’t exist.

(This should already be clear given that robots do exist, and we do call them robots, as you yourself noted, but never mind that for now.)

It’s not even about the level of mechanical or computational complexity. Automobiles have a lot of mechanical and computational complexity, but also aren’t called robots (ignoring of course self-driving cars).

What are robots or not is a point of debate - there are many different definitions.

Generally, it has to automate a task with some intelligence, so dishwashers qualify. It isn't a existence proof (nor did I state that).