Oh good I'm not the only one who noticed I thought I was going insane. 90% of the stuff that people seem to want to automate with LLMs to 'revolutionise [X] industry' was already being automated much better with bots, which is depressing because before this wave of LLMs we were all complaining about how shitty all the bots make everything when they're used to do things that shouldn't be automated, but now even a misimplemented non-AI bot is a comparative relief.
Point of order - that automation IS AI. It’s just not generative AI. It’s 20+-year-old AI.
I'm not in the industry so maybe you guys were using it like this and I didn't know, but I absolutely never heard these kinds of scripts called "AI" before this current LLM boom. People called plenty of stuff AI before this -- I've heard people call things like Alexa AI, video game NPC behaviour is called AI, etc. -- but if this kind of automation was ever called AI then that terminology wasn't anywhere I saw it. I only ever heard them called programs, scripts, add-ons, macros, or bots, depending on what specifically the tool was and what it did.
"automation IS AI" no, it's not. automation is you setting up a process. you control the if-then statements. you decide what triggers the process and how. And if something doesn't work correctly, you can go through the steps and figure out where you messed up. "AI" is supposed to do the learning and setting up for you; it is supposed to make the decisions so you don't have to. it is a fundamentally different process. Saying automation is AI is like saying the water wheel is AI. it is a process humans set up; that's not "intelligence" or "learning."
