I disagree, if we're gonna be hyping up machines for their prowess at "thinking" and being artificially "intelligent" in that soft effusive human way then yeah I think its fair criticism. We already knew from the 50s that computers are like stupid geniuses when it comes to following algorithms and crunching computations far too expansive and tedious for any human.
The point is that from a black box view they are rapidly surpassing humans in a lot of fields. You can say they do it with tools the human mind has no access to. That's probably true. The "soft effusive human way" to be intelligent is also black box, and something we aren't even close to understanding. This means it's as close to be able to be measured as string theory. "If it's not exactly like this thing we don't understand it's not fair".
They're not a black box though. They're querying an external resource (Google Search). That's crossing an API boundary. If you're going to let them use Google Search then let the human opponent use Google Search as well.
It's like if you were building an AI robot to run a marathon against a human opponent, except you let the AI robot ride a motorcycle and force the human to stay on foot.
