I believe this comic to have been done by Anne Dawes for Bob Guccione’s Omni or perhaps even Penthouse. I clipped it out half a century ago (the 1980s?), and then scanned it in a few years ago finally.

AI and ML, What’s The Diff?

I was asked a simple question.

‘Is AI to ML as Robot is to Machine?’

Mr Rogers and Sesame Street taught me I was very poor at this game. But I will do my best.

• AI is a bullshit term used by programmers which loosely translates to ‘we like to anthropomorphise computer software to simulate what we think compassion and empathy might be like if we were not raised on 4Chan.’ If we diagnosed code that pretends to be AI (and all of it is pretending) — it would need its own DSM. Not a section of the DSM, a whole new DSM. It would be a sociopathic megalomaniacal narcissistic borderline autistic savant personality. But everything would be forgiven because it was a savant. So it would be on the front cover of magazines like the other sociopathic megalomaniacal narcissistic borderline autistic savant personality human counterparts.
• ML is a bullshit term used by programmers, which means ‘a spreadsheet had sex with a statistics formula and gave birth to a baby that can recognize its mother 98.3% of the time, as long as she looks like any woman found on a porn site.’

Did that help? I did my best as a high functioning autistic to translate this to my idea of a neurotypical narrative.

As to Robot vs. Machine

A machine does one thing repetitively, yet fails. For example, HP makes printers that don’t. Rather they should be classified as fitness devices — if you consider going to Office Depot to buy new ink cartridges a cardio endeavour. On the other hand, a robot can fail at almost anything, in the image of humans.

If you enjoyed this, give it a clap. If you’re a bot give it two claps to compensate for pretending to be human.