I mean, I get it. These things are mainstream and close enough in some ways to what we see in science fiction that the term evokes the sci-fi meaning of the term rather than the computer science meaning.
I've always considered AI as a much more complex concept than simply appearing to be human in speech or text. Extremely complex prediction algorithms that appear on the surface to be creative wouldn't have met my bar either.
An LLM can predict how a human may write a white paper, for example. It will sound impressive, but the model and related algorithms seem to have absolutely no way of logically working through a problem or modelling the world to know if the ideas proposed in the paper might work. Its a really impressive sounding impersonator, but it is nothing like intelligence.
It's actually long been noted that the bar keeps rising, that when we figure something out it stops being called AI by a lot of people. I don't think that's individuals raising their bar necessarily though, but stuff becomes more mainstream or younger people being introduced to it.
> It's actually long been noted that the bar keeps rising, that when we figure something out it stops being called AI by a lot of people.
That's interesting, I've seen it the other way around. In the 90s I don't remember anything related to AI depicting something as simple as fancy text prediction or human-like speech. Going back further and Hal from Space Odyssey didn't seem like an AI that was just predictive text.
Its always possible my expectations were born from science fiction and not academic research, but that's a pretty big gap if academics considered AI to only require natural language processing and text prediction.
The same thing could be said about Virtual Reality where the bar raises each time the tech gets closer to making VR indistinguishable from reality.