They aren't talking about pathing or gameplay ai that has been around forever because the term AI has been coopted by genAI and that is what they are referring to.

That was OP's whole point

Damn, I almost forgot about crypto. My tired brain tried to protect me. But this word is up in the big league of lost words.

Indeed it is sadly…

This is a prefix I only heard the last few years, and I have no idea who started it. Everything with cyber has almost nothing to do with cybernetics.

It sounds so fake.

When I started learning the programming language Common Lisp, I thought there was only one AI winter. That's all the Lisp bros were talking about and how awesome the Lisp machine was.

But recently I'm wishing for a new one and looked it up on Wikipedia: there were already several AI winters.

The next one will be the AI winter for the next decades.

A Citroën 2CV, BMW Z3, and Ford Model T are all cars.

But now when someone says “car”, everyone assumes it's a Citroën 2CV.

This is the crazy world of “all AI is genAI”.

There's a German (kids') story about someone who was renaming everything. He called the table a chair. But he then had to give the chair a new name.

Trump forgot to give the former superintelligence a new name.

I remember how everyone talked about how the first Half-Life game implemented AI so well. The enemies were actually cunning, especially by the standards of the time; One enemy grunt would chase you into cover and have another grunt throw a grenade, while a third one circled around.

If a game today was released with a rumor of having "great AI implementation", a lot of people would understandably steer clear.

You're fighting the tide. There's never been a point in time where language had fixed, immutable definitions. It's always been transient, no matter what you learned, and it's not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just how communication and culture work.

Because both meanings are opposites, literally is a more specialized form of homonym called a contronym. Unlike a contronym such as clip where it’s to tell whether the speaker is talking about clipping things together or clipping stuff off of something based on their use in a sentence, literally and figuratively fit into any sentence the same way. In any case where the speaker’s words could be interpreted ambiguously to be literal or figurative and they add literally to clarify they can’t because someone could mistake their literal literally meaning to be a figurative one.

That means the literal use of literally is functionally lost, and for what? So folks have another way to exaggerate? I don’t care if a language evolves, but if it’s going to I think it should evolve in such a way that expressing certain ideas isn’t lost, especially if there isn’t anything real to be gained. I literally don’t understand why people are so gun-ho to defend using literally figuratively.

Now think about "theory": the popular meaning¹ and the original meaning, the one used in science².

¹ "it's just an idea"
² "it is proven beyond doubt with the current knowledge"

Because both meanings are opposites

"really" -> "extremely" is not the opposite of "really" -> "factually".

the literal use of literally is functionally lost

It isn't functionally lost any more than "really" has become functionally lost. It's contingent on context.

"It's really hot outside" and "He's really the murderer" have two very coherent and distinct interpretations.

In the same vein, "It's literally as hot as the sun out here" and "This Christian extremists are taking the Bible too literally" have distinct and non-interchangeable meanings.

But the term has (ahem) LITERALLY been used as an intensifier since 1769. You're far too late to the party on this debate. It's LITERALLY been settled for centuries.

Correct, we are in agreement. Sorry, my comments intent was “a bucket list is not a dated todo list”

How can it literally be settled if people are still arguing about it? Unless you mean figuratively? Good to know people two and a half centuries ago could write poorly.

How can it literally be settled if people are still arguing about it?

Same way people can wave a Confederate Flag 150 years after the war is over.

‘AI’ has been a marketing term since it was conjured in 1956, nothing of value has been lost in it being assimilated by a grift.

Whoosh

I think it's valid to have a visceral hatred for contranyms.

no one says Baud, that one is up for grabs

That's the fun part - you don't! In the absolutist landscape of social media it's impossible to discuss subjects where every comment is reduced to which of two polar opposite sides you are on. Either you hate capitalism or hate socialism. Either you are pro-AI and all the evils anyone has ever associated with it, or you're a tech-bro who wants to ruin the environment building datacenters. Many subjects in online discussions have reached the "Why bother?" stage.

I didn't realize people had been shot for not using literally figuratively. Plus one could argue that people waving the Confederate flag 150 years later means the war wasn't fully finished, but I'm not here to debate politics.

I don't understand why you compare "literally" to "really". They're two different words that are used differently. I really don't have any problem with using really as an intensifier because it aligns just fine with using it to indicate fact. "It's really hot outside" -> "The heat outside is real." "He's really the murderer" -> "His being the murderer is real."

But using literally in your example adds absolutely nothing to the sentence. "It's literally as hot as the sun out here" and "It's as hot as the sun out here" convey the exact same meaning, except one has an extra word that degrades other uses of it. If your sentence could replace the word "literally" with the word "figuratively" and you would intend the same meaning, you should either use "figuratively" or nothing there at all. That way when the word literally is used there can be no doubt that you mean "in the literal sense."

Many people who know the difference between theory and hypothesis say hypothesis when they mean hypothesis.

Haha. Language, culture and society, golly all I can say is, sometimes it do be like that...

Then why would it be absurd for gamers to demand games without AI if the gamers don't literally mean the older types of AI?

I don't think that's accurate. The earliest AI conferences (in the 50s) were taken up with programs, algorithms and ideas which, today, look incredibly primitive - solvers which could (very slowly, and not practically for anything interesting) solve logic problems if they were posed appropriately. Like a really shit version of a SAT-solver.

Turing wrote that a machine which passed the Turing Test could reasonably be described as a thinking thing. LLMs from several years ago (and in fact, models from years before that) could pass the Turing test, so they are very much the kind of thing he was talking about - yet they are certainly not AGI. As part of his discussion of this, he addressed several possible gaps, including about learning, meaning that something which convincingly passes the Turing test would also, to him, demonstrate some ability to learn.

Early on, "artificial intelligence" was used to describe what we now call AGI, but it was also used to describe all sorts of problems which, at the time, were only soluble by intelligent people - such as machine translation, image recognition, or finding an efficient path through a maze.

I am pretty sure we came up with DEFINITIONS. Now what does that word mean?

I having been fighting a tide of idiocy my entire life, but it doesn't mean I will drown in it.

Sorry. From your question, I didn't know you were an expert on CS/AI history. I defer to your wondrous knowledge on the subject to nitpick at what you baited me into talking about in detail.

Don't you mean SI?

¯\(ツ)/¯

Take advantage of yet another communication hook that the old internet gave us: word tagging.

You can for example request comments on 90s!AI or you can ask someone to convert a image!GIF for you.

irregardless

"Inflammable" means flammable!

Just say I'm getting old and can't cope next time

I'm not saying you can't hate them, but I am saying that all you'll achieve by that is getting angry all the time.

I just act like Randal when someone says I "can't say that" or use "that word" anymore.

You did it to yourselves by overreacting.

Baud comes from Baudot code. The things I learned getting a HAM license.

"GIF" as in giraffe, btw.

You forgot the biggest pronunciation hijack of the century.

Baud.

Well it is AI, it's just not all AI

I know, but I need to make a specific point to my managers and coworkers that LLMs are statistical guessing machines

Because AI used to mean the older types of AI. It's an example how the meaning of AI changed which OP is complaining about.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sorry I just didn't want to launch into what I already believed if you were talking about something different than what I thought.

If the inventor of .GIF was a linguist, maybe we would have used his suggestion. .GIF is a file format. JIF is a peanut-butter.

In video games, (enemy) AI can mean a pathfinding algorithm and a couple rules regarding the distance to the player

Isnt using machine learning as bad? LLMs dont include image, sound, animation generation as far as i know

Generative AI or genAI seems like the best term to use

Definitions are found, not made. ;)

Objects are found. We define objects. Then we make words. This seems so simple and people seem to want to make it complex.

I've always disliked these short and sweet justifications for one pronunciation over another as there's a million justifications that can go either way.

Here's an arguably more more apt example considering it contains every letter from the original acronym: "GIF" as in gift.

In my opinion, go with the one the causes less confusion. There's already a brand using the "JIF" pronunciation and nothing else using the "GIF" pronunciation so I prefer the hard G pronunciation.

Gerraffe it is.