Petition: Ban the stupid buzzword “AI”

Indeed, the word has become nearly meaningless, but it doesn't seem to be rampantly overused on HN. Looking at titles, it only appeared 3 times in the last week on stories with any upvotes [0]:

  AI Company Accused of Using Humans to Fake Its AI
  AI Looking to Become Robot Mayor in Tokyo’s Tama City 
  AI Predicts Obesity Prevalence from Space 

The 3rd one is the sort of nonsense I think you're complaining about. The first 2 are stories about AI as a business or cultural phenomenon, for which "AI" is the right term. So if we only have 1 story per week that uses it in a non-self-referential way, we can leave the pitchforks in the barn.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AI&sort=byPopularity&prefix&pa...

why don't we ban complaining about the semantics of "AI" too. Just about every thread on AI has someone saying that it's just layered regression or some similar rank dismissal. It's like saying calculus is just applied limits, true enough but not enlightening or useful.

imo I'm fine with any of these being called "AI"

- neural nets, deep or otherwise

- any classical ml techniques like decision trees, svm etc.

- any classical nlp techniques or tools

- "modern" nlp, eg. glove, fasttext etc