Angela Collier
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2026
1:03:18 · 698K views · Jul 16, 2023
Physicist and YouTuber Angela Collier argues in this hour-long video that AI as commonly described does not really exist. She covers the limits of the tools, biased datasets, and why they should not be used to make decisions.
HN people point to it as a clear, skeptical take on AI hype and the risks of unreliable AI classification, such as in mushroom foraging books.
3 comments from Hacker News
AI would be used (unsafely) to classify mushrooms, this exact prediction at 17:09 in Angela Collier's excellent "AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway" video, which I recommend for anyone interested in the subject: this video
It's important to understand that large-language models like ChatGPT do not "think" about the prompt and do not in any meaningful sense "understand" the result they give you. No matter how sophisticated they get, fundamentally they are still computer programs - systems for choosing words (and code fragments) that look right next to each other, according to some inferred rules. They are not driven by will or consciousness. You might be able to get ChatGPT to "tell" you (produce textual output) that it's intelligent and has feelings, but this is just as meaningless as if a book were titled "I am Intelligent and Have Feelings". Or as Angela Collier puts it, AI does not exist ( this video ). Such programs also often output things that are completely wrong and have no basis in reality, called "AI hallucinations", and as a beginner you are in no position to identify them . This is dangerous, because you can learn wrong things with no way to know that they're wrong. It could take a very long time for you to figure out the mistake, at which point a bad habit may already be ingrained. Responsible human teachers know what's technically correct, and will proactively warn that they're making a simplification - and will certainly not make something up just because it sounds right in context. Learning Python is not fundamentally different from learning any other programming language, which in turn is not significantly different from learning anything at all. You must start with fundamentals a
Somehow I new before clicking that it was going to be Angela. Two years ago: AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway this video