Me: eventually stumbles back far enough to find the inciting wail that People Are Just So Mean About My Field Of AI These Days
Me: hahalol
The thing, as I've been saying for longer than GPT's existed, is that "AI" doesn't, hasn't ever, and will never describe technology. It's the name of two things: firstly, a particular kind of tech industry investor-bait scam based around promising jam tomorrow. Secondly, a subfield of computer science, which is the beginning end of the pipeline which pumps out into the marketplace the wankers who run that kind of scam: Jam Tomorrow Studies.
You can complain that people refuse to evaluate the products of "AI" on their own merits because they have a knee-jerk interest in the social context producing them; well, y'know, yeah, the social context includes actual fascists and actual death cultist billionaires and actual global warming and actual widespread labour abuses and the destruction of actual lives, livelihoods, and industries? Yeah? Nobody wants to sit down with you and deliberately shove all that to one side and have a nice student-bar moon over the toyetics of ChatGPT, while ignoring it? wow, that's so fucking sad, but here's the thing: you try to launder that by talking about "well if people had produce the same thing as a bedroom project a decade ago people would have reacted differently" and "I was doing this before LLMs" and, buddy, yes they would. Yes. If a thing with the same UX appeared, then or now, in a radically different social context, the reaction would be different. You're, uh, see, you're copping to understanding the problem here after all: the context matters.
And you may have been doing this before LLMs, but you were still in the Jam Tomorrow factory, and as long as you do academic work under the auspices of "AI", you always will be, and you may not have had any way of knowing that it would come home to roost like this, but AI was never anything else. AI is the very stuff of tech bubbles. AI is lies and scams and merrily skipping out on the cheque at the end when everything collapses. That's what "AI" means, and always did.
You'll note that nobody ever called the procedural generation in traditional handbuilt roguelikes "AI". It's got as much or little connection to that inherently meaningless, nontechnological term as pretty much anything that actually gets called "AI", so why "procedural generation"? Because that's an actual tech term, it's a name for what people actually did, which is what happens when you're actually doing work not just keeping the lights on at the Jam Tomorrow factory until the next tech bubble. Context.
Sorry you built your career on a corner office in the JT factory! Sorry you only belatedly worked out that ecocidal union-busting Nazis own the deeds and everyone's calling your field "that ecocidal union-busting Nazi stuff" now! Sorry not sorry.