That might be reading too much into it. IIRC, hasn't gaming been referring to any kind of computer opponents as "AI" since at least the '80s? I'd almost call the games industry usage of AI as its own independent (albeit related) jargon at this point; games "AI" may use ML, NN, and other AI techniques but isn't required to.

I always found it weird when SNES-era console games would refer to the built-in opponent as the "computer". Like, it kind of makes sense, but it wasn't aligned to my understanding of what a computer was.

In any case, since around the release of Unreal Tournament in the late nineties, I've always just referred to them as bots— that feels for me like it strikes the right balance in terms of expressing that it's a non-human participant in the game, and one whose behaviours may be varying degrees of intelligent, as far as leveraging pre-scripted actions and potentially cheats.

"Bot" is an interesting adaptive use of Robot. Robot traditionally describing something mechanical with gears and made of steel. Something pretty different that the computer controlled characters in Unreal.

Also, it didn't hurt that UT bots were pretty impressive for the era (1999?) tech.

I.e. generally behaving pretty similar to players, minus the environment-exploitation

AI is a lot of things. It's essentially just the category of algorithms, control theory, and machine learning.

If you are just referring to AI as in ML, even then ML is at its core a series of processes for tuning control systems. Those ML models are just complex versions of traditional systems from control theory with the tuning handled by the training process.

So yes in a sense, procedural generation, constraint solvers, wave collapse, etc can all be seen as AI since they are just different ways of solving the problem of "how do I believably make/do X in a useful or believable way".

AI is literally just algorithms.

Yes, these days it's most commonly used to describe something that we can't quite understand the inner-workings of (huge neutral networks; big data), but A* pathfinding and decision trees are also AI.

It’s called AI until it works, then it’s called an algorithm.

It’s _all_ just algorithms.

But if you call it AI you get more investment

back when maze solving algorithms were unknown, BFS was AI. AI is magic, algorithms are what AI turns into when problems are actually figured out.

In the context of gaming I used to call it: “the computer”

Later I called it: “AI”

Such as “Is the AI still brain dead in Civilization VI?”

In a gaming context I think of it as entirely different from a more computer science definition of AI.

Game development has long used the term for anything that pretends to have intelligent behavior. It's not quite the same as other parts of tech use it.

My Netflix recommendation engine appears to be about as intelligent as those wolfenstein guards from back in the day

When I took an artificial intelligence class in college a long time ago, it covered things like path finding and breadth first search.

In video games, smoke and mirrors is an acceptable solution to any problem :)

Constraints solvers was literally half of my AI university course lol