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High school student uses AI to reveal 1.5 million previously unknown objects in space.
(www.caltech.edu)
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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The term “Artificial Intelligence” has been bandied around for over 50 years to mean all sorts of things.
These days, all sorts of machine learning are generally classified as AI.
But I used to work with Cyc and expert systems back in the 90s, and those were considered AI back then, even though they often weren’t trying to mimic human thought.
For that matter, the use of Lisp in the 1970s to perform recursive logic was considered AI all by itself.
So while you may personally prefer a more restrictive definition, just as many were up in arms with “hacker” being co-opted to refer to people doing digital burglary, AI as the term is used by the English speaking world encompasses generative and diffusive creation models and also other less human-centric computing models that rely on machine learning principles.
According to gamedevs, 1-player pong (that is, vs computer) involves AI. It's a description of role within the game world, not implementation, or indeed degree of intelligence, or amount of power. Could be a rabbit doing little more than running away scared, a general strategising, or a right-out god toying with the world, a story-telling AI. Key aspect though is reacting to and influence on the game itself or at least some sense of internal goals, agency, that set it apart from mere physics, it can't just follow a blind script. The computer paddle in pong fits the bill: It reacts dynamically to the ball position, it wants to score points against the player, thus, AI. The ball is also simulated, possibly even using more complex maths than the paddle, but it doesn't have that role of independent agent.
Valid point, though I’m surprised that cyc was used for non-AI purposes since, in my very very limited knowledge of the project, I thought the whole thing was based around the ability to reason and infer from an encyclopedic data set.
Regardless, I suppose the original topic of this discussion is heading towards a prescriptivist vs descriptivist debate:
Should the term Artificial Intelligence have the more literal meaning it held when it first was discussed, like by Turing or in the sci-fi of Isaac Asimov?
OR
Should society’s use of the term in reference to advances in problem solving tech in general or specifically its most prevalent use in reference to any neural network or learning algorithm in general be the definition of Artificial Intelligence?
Should we shift our definition of a term based on how it is used to match popular use regardless of its original intended meaning or should we try to keep the meaning of the phrase specific/direct/literal and fight the natural shift in language?
Personally, I prefer the latter because I think keeping the meaning as close to literal as possible increases the clarity of the words and because the term AI is now thrown about so often these days as a buzzword for clicks or money, typically by people pushing lies about the capabilities or functionality of the systems they’re referring to as AI.
The lumping together of models trained by scientists to solve novel problems and the models that are using the energy of a small country to plagiarize artwork also is not something I view fondly as I’ve seen people assume the two are one in the same despite the fact one has redeeming qualities and the other is mostly bullshit.
However, it seems that many others are fine with or in support of a descriptivist definition where words have the meaning they are used for even if that meaning goes beyond their original intent or definitions.
To each their own I suppose. These preferences are opinions so there really isn’t an objectively right or wrong answer for this debate