"If-else rule-based systems" aka expert systems are an example of symbolic artificial intelligence e.g. "Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence". Just because it doesn't use the newest most trendy methods doesn't mean it isn't AI, and even if you object to applying the AI label to these kind of systems, these systems are nevertheless valid targets for regulation.
"In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert.[1] Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if–then rules" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system
"Symbolic AI used tools such as logic programming, production rules, semantic nets and frames, and it developed applications such as knowledge-based systems (in particular, expert systems), [...]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...
An acronym with the word "statistics" would not have been able to sell the false sense of precision or superior deduction or the 'entity able to think' that is implied by putting "AI" in the sentence.
Such marketing is hijacking what the general public has come to know over the past two centuries as AI through sci-fi novels and films, which now they wants to be rename to Artificial General Intelligence, AGI ?
One would expect they edit all the sci-fi novels and movies around the history for to avoid the AI acronym confusion, but in such case the marketing would stop being effective, because the quid is within my first sentence, they sell the false sense of precision or superior deduction, when in fact there are only statistical models. Pure oxymoron, as statistics in itself sounds like an acronym for "lack of precision".
This is sort of my point - one of the options is "rule based system". That doesn't need to be statistical at all. It doesn't look like what people would think of as AI at all. I don't see why it isn't just "you can't use computers for this" and AI is an implementation detail.
> It doesn't look like what people would think of as AI at all.
If by “people” you mean specifically the subset of people who have technical knowledge or who read HN, then sure, but in the wider population, anything that seems intelligent that’s fine by a computer is AI, they don’t care if it’s using statistical techniques, a random number generator or a bunch of conditionals. Laypeople don’t know or care what happens under the hood.
I once heard a conversation between an old boss of mine and an investor where my boss was saying that the software did calculations X and Y automatically and the investor responded with “so it’s AI”. My thought was “wait what? No it’s not” but my boss said something like “AI is anything that people perceive as intelligence thats artificial”. Historically, exist systems were seen as AI and they weren’t necessarily statistics based. That’s why we have more technical terms like machine learning.
But I agree, that laws should be far more specific about what they mean and “you can use a computer for this” would be better.m, if that’s what they really mean.
By such logic a company could call wood steam engines neutron-free nuclear fission engines, as they convert the water vapour into mechanical energy. It would be to change and/or to blend the properties of any technical word or concept freely, and legitimately, for to commerce, marketing promotion or any purpose. If generalized I guess it would promote and increase the misleading advertising cases exponentially.
( If I can humbly comment about what happened in the conversation you heard, it seems that your boss eluded an "it is not Machine Learning, it is better" and blended an answer for to avoid confronting or disappointing the investor some way )
I spoke to him about it after and he said something like: if it looks intelligent to the user, and it’s done by a computer, the user sees it as artificial intelligence, since they don’t care about the underlying tech that drives it. Just how startups often manually process the first few customers requests or get mechanical Turk to do something. Users just see the end result and don’t really know or care if it was implemented by a mess of if statements, machine learning, or magical fairy dust. They just see a machine acting in ways that seem intelligent.
Of course that very much muddies and dilutes the terminology, but AI was always an imprecise and badly defined term and, as was pointed out, earlier AI techniques wouldn’t be seen as that nowadays: by todays standard, I wouldn’t consider expert systems or minmax tree search or whatever as AI, but once upon a time, when the term was coined, it certainly was.
Intelligence is the capability to form (predictive) models (to solve problems through evaluating strategies through the aforementioned model). General intelligence is the ability to do it over an arbitrary range of problems.
Even an if-else tree is a model. Building the model based on data leads to high predictive power.
It's become commonly accepted to mean any algorithmic system.
It's probably better to use an accepted umbrella term rather than multiple specific scientific ones in this case.
Fuzzy and misused words are pushed to muddy the semantics. Actual AI doesn't exist.
If/else, case, and while statements are basic building blocks of automation and computational logic. Intelligence is far from anything we've done with computers. It is a parlor trick looking for money right now.
The word "actual" is doing a lot of lifting there. Artificial intelligence has existed for decades. Presumably you mean "artificial general intelligence", whatever that's even supposed to mean (it's subjective, and for many people it's a matter of literal religious faith that humans have something called souls which machines can never possibly emulate, and therefore "actual AI" is literally impossible as far as they're concerned.) Well anyway... if you want to say AGI, just say AGI. AI is more general than that and the term is well established to encompass a great many methods and kinds of systems. Many kinds of AI are very primitive and seem trivial today; they are nonetheless "actual AI".
It's not "sloppy use of words", both the term and the practice of AI have been around for far longer than today's probabilistic models. In particular, decision trees and similar are some of the simplest forms of AI.
The difference between an AI and a "regular" bunch of if/else statements is, in my opinion, the ease of adding new rules to the system. That's why something like Prolog counts as AI.
With a technical audience, it is better to use actual terminology.
However the general public does not have the knowledge to understand these. These are the people using ChatGPT and for them it is AI. We can correct them, but it's likely they won't care.
The general public is being misled with overwrought appeals to emotion and misused terms applied in a deliberately overbroad manner. AI may contain algorithms but an algorithm is not AI.
Social media feed algorithms are bad, and the public is awakening to the damage they cause. But they are not AI. As Yan LeCun pointed out recently, AI is actually the solution to the problems created by "algorithms."
Because it's still AI. If I write a simple program "if black, no scholarship" it should still face the same regulations as the latest LLM evaluating scholarships.
Then why call it AI?