Wayne Parham Messages: 18955 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
The public impression of AI and its recent popularity is actually a focus on a part of an evolution that has been going on since the 1950s.
The latest trends started about ten years ago. That's where you saw things like speech recognition and optical character recognition improved using statistical weighting. You also started seeing 3D models and animations get more photorealistic in things like faces. We were using fractals decades ago, and that helps a lot when modeling certain structures in nature. And we used things like motion capture to get realistic movements. But in the last decade or so, we could use computer models instead.
These were evolutions of some of the same or similar technologies that people are now starting to call AI.
AI is actually very broad though, and what we are calling AI now will evolve further, and some current approaches will be subordinated by others. We can do incredible stuff with the tools we have now, but it's sort of like an eddy current. We'll back out and come at it again a few times, with some major shifts along the way.
Anyway, all that to say that photo-realistic computer modeling has been evolving for decades, and the technologies used to create realistic images are sort of what I would say are "adjacent to AI."