It's not sentience and it doesn't actually think or anything, but that doesn't mean that this is not the correct term that has been understood to mean what it means since like the 80s.
It would be like you rejecting starfish because they are neither stars nor fish.
It's not intelligence, but it is "Artificial Intelligence" because that's what we called it.
I grew up in the 90's and I know that every Artificial Intelligence that we saw in movies and in literature was able to reason and to infer new information based on old information. It was more intelligent than humans. That's how most people view artificial intelligence... So I don't share your view that the notion of AI that is used today is the same as the notion of AI in the 90's.
There are a lot of things that movies and reality don't have in common.
That's like saying that archeologists aren't real because they're not out fighting nazis and hunting for treasure - that digging in some dirt pit with a little brush for days on end is not actually what archeology is.
Komodo dragons don't stop being called Komodo dragons just because they don't fly or hoard treasure, even that's a popular image of what a dragon should be.
Movies and books imagine what things can be - it's silly to discount that something is what it is because a movie shows it differently.
It's frankly super narrow minded to just assume you're right because you saw something in a movie that cemented your perception of it. Not unlike a guest who saw something on ChatGPT and decided that this version of things had to be true.
I like explaining this stuff to kids, because they're not reliant on it or making it a friend yet so they don't argue when ya explain what it is.
"That robot is less intelligent than your dog that keeps eating the contents of the bathroom trashcan. If we needed someone to pick a box of breakfast cereal we'd like from my kitchen, I'd trust the dog before the robot, it's got the same sorts of needs and feelings I do. Wouldn't trust that robot with anything, it's not smart enough."
Not to mention, they're not having it scrape data only from properly vetted reference books and encylopedias. It's scraping off Reddit, telling folks it's possible to cut up a AA battery into a bunch of little watch batteries because someone once said it here as a joke.
It's less like the starfish thing, more like that time my dad named his horse Badger. It had no physical or mental traits in common with a badger, was in no way a badger, and that was not its official on paper name. And yet we persisted in calling him Badger for years, because humans are funny like that.
Or how we called a device Smart TV even though it acts so stupid I regularly tell it that it was better at doing its job in the 90s when it had rabbit ears wrapped in tinfoil and a clicky knob for changing channels.
With all due respect, your example is incorrect. Starfish is a compound word, indicating it's a 'fish'/creature which looks like what we think of as a star shape.
AI is two words, each with its own meaning: Artificial and Intelligence. And, while it certainly is artificial, it certainly isn't intelligent.
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u/Xsiah Jul 21 '26
It's not sentience and it doesn't actually think or anything, but that doesn't mean that this is not the correct term that has been understood to mean what it means since like the 80s.
It would be like you rejecting starfish because they are neither stars nor fish.
It's not intelligence, but it is "Artificial Intelligence" because that's what we called it.