As a game dev, the fact "AI" as a keyword became totally unusable is quite annoying.
It's a hard problem because "AI" has been a term since the 50s but has been used to describe different approaches to making a computer do things over time. The way game developers use "AI" to mean "hardcoded logic for game behavior" is fully inline with what "AI" meant in the 60s when they were using symbolic AI to write the first computer-controlled chess games.
Then AI programmers hit the wall of hard-coded logic, went through an AI winter, and what survived on the other end was logic that was automatically trained from big data sets. We used to call that "machine learning" because "AI" had connotations of snake oil from previous AI winters. But then within the past decade, tech companies with grandiose ambitions decided that "machine learning" was too nerdy so resurrected "AI" to refer to LLMs and their ilk.
The term is just a muddled mess.
I think AI for game NPCs is perfectly valid terminology. The actor senses the surroundings and makes decisions to achieve its goals within the constraints and events of the environment.
I disagree. Hardcoded means you need to change and recompile the entire program. So neither an .env file nor model weights that are loaded at runtime are 'hardcoded'.
I would define it more broadly, "same input == same output, with the same program" and using that definition all computer programs are hardcoded in the end.
There is a gray area, you can consider that even programs that use random() are in the hardcoded category as with the same (semi)random value they will produce the same output. You just need to think of the random value as input, since not all input needs to be user input.
The whole idea behind "hard-coded" and original symbolic AI was that a skilled human deliberately wrote explicit code to define a program's behavior.
Machine learning is the exact opposite of that approach.
AI - artificial intelligence
Just by using the term "AI" I feel like you are indicating that it is not actually intelligence, otherwise you would call it intelligence instead. Therefore using hard-coded logic to fake behavioral patterns makes perfect sense.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/artifici...
There's no ambiguity when speaking, but when searching Rust-related things I get a lot of Rust game stuff. "Rust crates" or "Rust drops" correspond to in-game things so the fandom wiki will pop up. Occasionally I'll even get rust-removal webpages.
If you search for 'rust crypto', you get results for Rust cryptographic packages as well as Rust in the cryptocurrency space (as it's become very popular with that audience)
Same with googling 'game dev AI', as I've been doing to learn about behaviour trees/FSM, you get inundated by articles of people with a Claude subscription and a dream.
a. Like on /r/crypto: https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/
b. "Don't roll your own crypto(graphy)!" is/was a popular hacker slogan: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Don%27t+roll+your+own+crypto
Partly for technical accuracy, partly to manage the average person's expectations when they hear "AI", partly to avoid contributing to a big dumb-money "everything is AI" bubble, etc.
I find just juxtaposing these two normal words flows much more nicely from the tongue than the comparatively awkward "LLM".