Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer.

The intelligence is not artificial, but instead distilled human intelligence.

LLMs pick up unseen patterns from trillions of data points that come from the entire human corpus of content. Literally thousands of years of human creativity and expression needed to be created and written so that today’s AIs can train.

The seeming intelligence of LLMs doesn’t come from the machine, but comes from modeling the patterns of what humans did. After all, the M in LLM stands for Model.

It’s like we are all collectively impressed by the fluid movement of the shadows of a dancer, instead of the dancer themselves.

There’d be no LLM without that massive base of human writing. Calling it Artificial Intelligence unfairly ignores the vital contribution of humans to this whole project. This isn’t creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing.

Maybe we need a new term that better acknowledges the human foundation of these systems. Thoughts?