But Just What is This ‘Artificial Intelligence’?
The article discusses the overuse and misinterpretation of the term 'artificial intelligence' in contemporary discourse. It highlights how the concept has evolved from earlier technological terms and critiques the marketing of AI as a catch-all solution. The author emphasizes the distinction between true intelligence and the automated processes labeled as AI, suggesting that many current applications merely replicate aspects of human cognition without genuine understanding.
- ▪The term 'artificial intelligence' is often oversold and misused in marketing.
- ▪Current AI applications primarily automate tasks without true cognitive understanding.
- ▪Machine vision systems exemplify how AI can efficiently perform specific cognitive tasks.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/06/03/but-just-what-is-this-artificial-intelligence/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:00:50 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T14:02:09.177Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T14:02:09.177Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
But Just What Is This ‘Artificial Intelligence’? No comments by: Maya Posch June 3, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy In the world of buzzwords, the acronym ‘AI’ has absolutely been the buzziest of buzzing buzzwords for at least a few years now. Where previously terms like ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ sufficed to promote a product, we are now being told that we are living in an age where this supposedly newfangled ‘artificial intelligence’ is doing literally everything faster and better while also curing cancer on the side. Yet, as a wise man once said: “You keep using that word.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
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