Why We Must Stop Calling Our Current AI Systems "Intelligent"

The term is doing more damage than good because it implies a subjective quality that hasn't been defined, measured, or proven — and by continuing to use imprecise language, we are engineering ourselves into believing the technology can understand when it can only predict.

The title of this thread has already lost the argument by over-complicating a term that's always been elastic. We keep trying to define "intelligence" as some static, monolithic threshold that AI hasn't crossed, but intelligence was never defined that way in the first place—it was always an estimate based on observed behavior. If you want to be pedantic (which I assume this thread is), then yes, a transformer architecture isn't thinking; it's performing probabilistic token prediction across high-dimensional vector spaces. But if we stop calling it intelligent because of that distinction, we lose the word entirely for any system we didn't personally build and understand to the atomic level. The user I asked GPT to debug yesterday solved a production bug in seconds that would have taken me four hours—the output was "intelligent" by every pragmatic definition available to us. We can argue semantics all day about whether this is reasoning or statistical inference, but at some point the distinction becomes performative. If you want to keep the word intelligent for humans only, fine, redefine it; but don't pretend that redefining a dictionary term changes what the technology actually does in practice.