That’s an excellent overview. Some of us in this part of the blogosphere have been playing around with “AI” for a couple of years now and the initial exhilaration and excitement has largely dissipated. The work that’s been done to render the models capable of providing useful and accurate data has so far only managed to flatten out everything that was strange and charming about them, while still mostly failing to prevent those “hallucinations” that make the output so dangerous.

The thing that most surprised me is that the term “AI” is now so widely and uncritically accepted both in the media and by users. It’s become generic and meaningless and as you suggest has replaced any number of prior terms that were much more accurate. There is no prospect of that changing so we’re stuck with it now but it makes any discussion on the topic fraught with misunderstanding. Certainly there’s no current expectation of anything even remotely similar to the kind of machine consciousness we used to mean when we used the term. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another question.