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I usually try to say 'LLMs' or 'bots' because I don't think the systems we're currently talking about are 'artificial intelligence'. Unfortunately 'AI' is the term that the companies themselves use and which the media seems to have accepted, but from where I'm standing, calling these systems 'AI' is a kind of marketing gimmick. I think I would reserve the term 'AI' for something that's genuinely intelligent.
In any case, I'm not sure I buy the leap into the material world? We've had CAD for decades. 3D printing is mostly a hobby technology, isn't it? At any rate, the best case scenario here is, what, that you can use an LLM or similar system to help produce models for 3D printing?
You're right, I think, that what would really make a difference is automated construction. But I don't yet see any reason to think that's on the horizon. Manipulating language is one thing, but we still very much struggle to build robots capable of interacting with material reality.
This is an inane but weirdly popular talking point that would have been a lot fairer (if lower-stakes and off-puttingly pedantic to normies) to bring up literal decades ago when "AI" was commonly being used to refer to simple single-purpose algorithms in charge of a vaguely anthropomorphic object, like "enemy AI" in a video game. I think it would have been fair to object that those aren't actually AI. But at this point, with the LLMs, people trying to invoke the same argument are dealing with an increasingly clear invisible-unicorn-in-the-garage situation, where the actual underlying belief is that they can't be AI because AI is inherently impossible, but they often know on some level that that's silly because materialism, so they try to launder it through asserting that actually, the essence of real intelligence is the ability to pass whatever specific tests we haven't managed to get the AI up to human level performance at yet.
Like, people know that par-human capability in everything wasn't ever how people defined AI, right? That's closer to a definition of ASI.
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