Seriously, this stupid fucking semantics game from people who know jack shit about the history or structure of the field while society is crumbling around us are infuriating. The term was created early in the life of the field in 1956 and was quickly widely adopted. AI as a field exists to study tasks that computers can do that would typically be considered in the domain of humans or other living beings, i.e. requiring intelligence; the term wasn’t created to trick people.

That’s why when you play a game and do a frustrating escort quest because the character you’re escorting behaves like someone with severe brain damage, “the AI sucks”. Not because you think there is (or is supposed to be) conscious superintelligence inside Bilbip Flipflop who’s supposed to be following you to the next checkpoint according to a bunch of conditionals executing on your 2004 IBM, but because that coordinated act of reacting to the world around them is supposed to be emulating what a real person would do given that role.

If you want to piss around with Philosophy 101 about about the nebulous nature of the word intelligence and how much that translates to some concept of “true”, conscious understanding versus simply interpreting external data to achieve tasks, then live your best life. But it’s clearly a meaningless distraction when the world is fucking on fire.