We should stop using images of humanoid robots to represent an embodied form of artificial intelligence, especially when the AI being referenced is an algorithm, which in almost all cases in the mainstream media, it is. It’s confusing for readers because we’re nowhere near the kind of general intelligence that these pictures imply. For the foreseeable future, “AI” is a set of machine learning algorithms that “maximise a reward function” and is incapable of anything more than solving very specific problems with a lot of help.
AI isn’t magic, it’s just maths. I know that statistical methods aren’t as cool as the androids but if we really want people to get a better conceptual understanding of AI we’d be better off using images like this to illustrate the outputs of AI-based systems:
