That's not what the EU regulation does. As an example, High Risk Machine Translation will be regulated no matter how you do it. The standard underlying the EU's AI Act explicit mention that AI system can be anything from rule-based to machine learning and mention some other AI methods. The regulation is on task/usage not on the technology.
Edit: "High Risk" in my example refers to the usage
Then why call it AI?
"Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI
"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".
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.
( 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 )
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.
Even an if-else tree is a model. Building the model based on data leads to high predictive power.
AI is an okay term for this IMHO.
I think its meaning may be shifting, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning#Artificial_in... still shows it as a broader term than “machine learning”, including expert systems.
Also note that decision tree learning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree_learning) basically is a search for a good rule-based system.
It's a very broad umbrella term, machine (and deep) learning are only subsets - although the main drivers these days.
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.
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".
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.
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."