So I'm curious — we're all here because we at least hate the current state of AI with hallucinating facts, being used to undress women and children, and all the fuckery that goes along with it.
I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, which takes place on a ship with a perfect AI that does everything right and basically does nothing wrong. It never hallucinates information; it's always right. It has never been used to undress people against their will; however, the Holodeck is kind of an extension of that and was used for that on Deep Space Nine, when operated by a Ferengi (capitalist alien race in a world where humans are communist). But the Enterprise holodeck would never do that. The shipwide AI also does not traditionally carry on conversations. The one time it does, the human was hallucinating — sort of. The doctor was in a pocket universe, people were disappearing, and at one point the AI told her she was the only crew person on the Enterprise, and no, that did not make sense, but that that was still how it was. Because, in her pocket universe, it was true.
So the question is... would you want a perfect AI that was incapable of lying or harbouring anything untrue? Basically you could ask it anything and it would give you the correct answer.
The one fault I can find with that fictional AI is when Data (the android), dressed like Sherlock Holmes, asked the computer to "create an enemy which rivals my intelligence." He meant to say Sherlock Holmes's intelligence, who he was cosplaying, but the computer made a self-aware malicious AI that got out of the Holodeck and tried to destroy the ship... because it was told to do so. Other than that, though.
...I'm not trying to mislead anyone, so I will drop the other shoe, answer the begged question now. I've always felt that to get to that level of AI, we need to wade through the shit we're in now. So yeah, before you ask, that's kind of the point of the thought exercise. However, I will also say that I do not think we will get to Star Trek AI, I think we will get to Terminator AI, destroying the world rather than lifting people up. I think maybe in the Star Trek universe, AI didn't really take off until people realised that war wasn't the answer, after WW3/the Eugenics Wars, and so they were making AI to make things better, not worse. We are not in that timeline. I look at what is happening now, IRL, and the timeline in the Terminator franchise, and it's clear to me that that one is more realistic.
That said, I still wonder if anyone would want AI if it did not have any of the problems.
So what is the ship's computer, if not AI? It's shown it can think for itself. It's more advanced than the AI we have now. Are you saying it's lesser?
Always struck me as a rich command interface with a natural language processor slapped on the front.
And, taking the technobabble for what it's worth, it's always described as having deterministic outputs. I don't think it's fair to say it's ever evidenced as having "thought for itself". Any time one might be tempted to suggest it had, I'd argue it was still following a deterministic algorithm, written and designed for whatever it was doing... rather than relying on a black-box model to generate outputs for an unanticipated input.
You can have generative algorithms without things like LLMs or difussion models.
Categorizing it as "lesser" is extremely subjective. Lesser in what way? Do I think that it's functionally superior as a source of information than an LLM? Yes. As an operational interface for a machine (the ship)? Yes. Do I think it has the flexibility of an LLM? No.