I have a friend named Marcus Hutchins who doesn't believe modern AI is intelligent. He thinks it's basically autocomplete. We actually had a full debate about it here that you should check out.
But I wanted to post a follow-up to that debate because I have some evidence—and a challenge—to share.
Over the last few days, I've been doing a ton of projects, and one of them has been cleaning up my site and adding some functionality.
Over the years I've had images hosted in many other CMSs, and most recently the whole site was on Beehiiv. I wanted to bring all the images home to my own local image store, so I had AI do the following:
When I moved my site from Beehiiv, I had a lot of content that was wrapped in super nasty HTML bundles. This was because Beehiiv is a newsletter platform, and it doesn't really care about Markdown or clean HTML. It just wants to send out emails.
So it wasn't just images that were super broken, it was also the core content as well. When I brought my content back over from Beehive, it was all wrapped in this super nasty embedded HTML bundle.
And the whole point of going to my new static site was to have everything be pristine Markdown, with none of the content modified during the conversion.
So now I have an AI function where I basically just say, "Clean up this post", and I hand it any URL, and it goes and:
It's completely insane.
Anyone who has done any technical work around maintaining a website, or complex HTML, will instantly recognize how tedious this work is.
And most importantly—several things here you can't just script.
Even for the tasks that someone could code, it'd still be shit work to do, and it'd take forever to troubleshoot. Claude wrote dozens of these over the course of the work, with many being a couple hundred lines of code, and it did it all in a few seconds.
Including testing afterwards. And providing monitoring and status updates all along so I could watch its progress.
These all would have required a human to do the work, and it would have taken weeks or months to do it all manually. Or you pay someone to do it—probably poorly—and it would cost thousands of dollars.
TL;DR: This was hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars worth of work that I just had AI do in a few days.
I don't see how it's possible to argue this isn't intelligence.
Again, this is not possible to do without either manual human work, or AI. In fact, that's my actual definition of AI.
Marcus disagrees. As we cover in the debate, he defines it more as a completely new thing—like Einstein's
I have multiple problems with this:
Essentially, Marcus has defined intelligence so tightly that he's made the definition useless.
He's defined it in a way that doesn't apply to the difficult cognitive work that hundreds of millions of people are being paid lots of money to do. Work that they might no longer be paid for because of the technology shown above.
Whatever we want to call that.
Do we really need a new name?
Cognitive Work Replacement Technology?
I don't see the need for it. The existing name already works.