People on the Fediverse get angry because I don’t use AI as a synonym for “generative LLMs.”

There’s a reason for that: it’s fucking stupid.

I’ve been playing video games my entire life. Half the reason I still use social media is to talk about video games.

And in games, AI has always meant enemy behaviour, pathfinding, squad logic, and all the little scripts that make NPCs either brilliant or braindead. Nothing to do with LLMs.

And this week I bought an LG OLED TV. The box blasts AI like as a feature headline. Is LG talking about generative models? Obviously not. It’s talking about DSP pipelines, scene classifiers, and super-scaling. Real, old-school applied ML.

What bothers me is this constant habit of redefining technical terms around whatever flavour-of-the-month happens to annoy you. If you’re mad about AI image slop, suddenly AI must only mean “that thing that generates slop.”

It’s the same pattern as people using algorithm to mean “the part of social media I don’t like” instead of the utterly basic concept it actually is.

I’m not interested in that kind of outrage-driven semantic drift. I’m not going to take broad technical terms and collapse them down to the single thing currently making someone angry.