The term ‘artificial intelligence’ has been misapplied for years.
I remember First Gen AI, then 2nd, then 3rd, then 4th.
IBM came to our worksite to demo a 4th Gen AI program. It had a list of questions that you supplied data for, and then it calculated the cost of your insurance based on that ‘data’. I laughed at it and them, because I had an ANALOG COMPUTER made out of plastic and wires back when I was a kid, and it could do the same thing.
NOW, that being said, there were some other ‘programs’ that I ran into on other computers (D.E.C.) that gave the appearance of ‘intelligence’.
The first was a program call DUNGEON. It was Dungeons and Dragons and you played it by simply typing in what you wanted to do. The reason I thought it was AI was because it could parse whatever you typed in and give a response. It was pretty darn good at figuring out what you ‘meant’.
The other program was on the VAX mainframes back at DEC headquarters. I didn’t know about it until several years after I started working with a DEC Minicomputer. I had to place many service calls, and always thought the person on the other end was very friendly, helpful, and easy to talk to.
One day, one of the C.E’s (customer engineers) from DEC came out to work on our PDP 11/70 (DEC minicomputer) and somehow we got around to talking about AI and VOICE recognition software, and voice output from computers.
That was when he told me that the ‘person’ I called at DEC to place my service call, wasn’t a person at all. It was a program on the VAX. I can tell when I hear a computer generated ‘voice’ on the phone, but I couldn’t tell that the DEC service line was a computer generated voice.
Just like the MacIntosh’s (Apple computers) that had voice software that could read any text on your computer TO YOU.
I had such software on my MAC 30 years ago. Funny, I hardly ever hear of anyone having such voice software on a PC, and when they do, the voice is really crappy and you can tell it isn’t a human.
Sometimes it seems like we are going backward, technologically.
I remember when the Adventure program first became available on a timeshare computer at work. A friend of mine and I spent several weeks of evenings mapping out Colossal Cave. At the time, that program understood a seemingly large number of words.