>old definition of AI

There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities.

AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.

You are very wrong here.

The term "AI" never meant bots in general.

It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.

IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted.

Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.

[0] JR Flynn: The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978.

[1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence

[2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence

So it's an ever-shifting goalpost, which makes it pretty useless as an objective.

Yeah, but there's attempts to fix it. The Cholet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547) is a good attempt, shifting from measuring ~skill to measuring ~acquiring skill. It's the framework behind ARC-AGI benchmarks.

Many people can't abide being something other than the center of the universe, and they get antsy when something might challenge that "unique" position.

Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.

Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical.

AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.

FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?

I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades.

The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.

As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?

The marketing people didn't take over. Some self-aggrandizing self-destroying billionaires did.

I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.

Unfortunately the West has yet to have their socialist revolutions

What's "the West"?

UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.

Hilarious