Jesus. I remember when statistical translation was considered "AI".
Fun fact: One time I put "trompe le monde" into Google Translate, and it came back with the inspired mistranslation, "doolittle"
(computer science) Anything that performs better than whatever we called “artificial intelligence” a few years ago.
M-W has (IMHO rightly) these two senses:
artificial intelligence
noun
1 : a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers
2 : the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior
And that's it. There's no plural "artificial intelligences" or singular "an AI" because this term never refers to a specific system, it may refer to the field or the property but not to the specific machines which (perhaps) possess some artificial intelligence as the attribute/capability. Even if you'd have a system with fully superhuman capabilities, it wouldn't be "a artificial intelligence" because you simply don't (or at least shouldn't) call things or systems "artificial intelligences", just as you don't call people "natural intelligences".
a) Intelligence that is produced "artificially, meaning by computer programming
b) Intelligence which is not intelligence but artificial so, thus not "real" intelligence.
Despite the documented failure modes (and they were many), suddenly it was possible to read articles in other languages, and it was likewise possible to make yourself understood in other languages using it. I personally know a lot of people who speak multiple of those languages. And they all agreed that it was a giant improvement. And the fact that it WAS a giant improvement was why they got rid of the previous translator.
I understand that it was terrible with Chinese. But I never used it for that.
Part of the problem was that there is a lot less grammar in Chinese than in Indo-European languages. So there are many ways to translate a given Indo-European sentence into Chinese, and you need to understand context on a Chinese sentence to properly translate it into an Indo-European one.
The many ways to translate to Chinese is a problem because Chinese flexibility in word order means that there are many choices of reasonable next word, and they didn't have enough data to tell the difference between a reasonable next word and an unreasonable one.
Going the other way Chinese may not care whether you have one apple or 10 apples, or whether Xi is a man or a woman. But Indo-European languages generally do care. So Google Translate has to guess, and often gets it wrong.