Do you know the historical industry-standard definition of AI? Do you? I invite you to look up "History of Artificial Intelligence" on Wikipedia because the term is a lot more nebulous than many people assume.
In fact, "AI" used to refer to practically everything under the sun related to even the most rudimentary attempts to simulate intelligence. The field of "AI" included basic tree search, decision trees, basic if/then algorithms, and statistical techniques such as Markov models. Many are surprised to learn that machine learning was the most advanced subset of "AI". In my 2007 undergrad class called "Artificial Intelligence", machine learning was the last unit of our course, and neural nets were only mentioned as an afterthought on the last day of class, with the professor noting it had potential in the future. Today, they're ubiquitous.
Just about the only field which defined "AI" as anything more than a machine, was from the entertainment industry including movies and video games. Mass Effect popularized the terminology of "VI" vs "AI" in which a VI (virtual intelligence) isn't conscious, but an AI (artificial intelligence) is. I will bet you that the vast majority of people who insist that AI by definition refers to a conscious entity is actually remembering this terminology from Mass Effect, a science fiction game, and in their heads had somehow convinced themselves that it was an actual industry-standard naming system used by computer science researchers.
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