Not sure if this is the best community to post in; please let me know if there's a more appropriate one. AFAIK Aii@programming.dev is meant for news and articles only.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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Langton's ant can procedurally generate things, if you set it up right. Would you call that AI?
As for enemies in gaming, it got called that because game makers wanted to give the appearance of intelligence in enemy encounters. Aspirationally cribbing a word from sci-fi. It could just as accurately have been called "puppet behavior"... more accurately, really.
The point is "AI" is not a useful word. A bunch of different disciplines across computing all use it to describe different things, each trying to cash in on the cultural associations of a term that comes from fiction.
I think what people are struggling to articulate is that, the way AI gets thrown around now, it's basically being used as a replacement for the word "algorithm".
It's obfuscating the truth that this is all (relatively) comprehensible mathematics. Even the black box stuff. Just because the programmer doesn't know each step the end program takes, doesn't mean they don't know the principals behind how it was made, or didn't make deliberate choices to shape the outcome.
There's some very neat mathematics, yes, and an utterly staggering amount of data and hardware. But at the end of the day its still just an (large) algorithm. Calling it AI is dubious at best, and con-artistry at worst.