Current artificial intelligences aren't actually intelligent. What would be a better name for them? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Most of the time, what a layman calls an artificial intelligence, an AI researcher would instead call a model.

But there is no such thing as an artificial intelligence.

If it’s a thing that takes an input (image, text, game state, etc.) and makes a prediction (age, sentiment, next move, etc.), then it’s a model.

If it’s a piece of software that uses a model’s predictions to take actions, then it’s likely a bot. For example, a system that uses a text model to create new text might be a chat bot, and a system that plays Dota using a model to predict its next move is also a bot.

But the term “bot” here is problematic, because there are many bots that don’t use any machine learning under the hood. Most game bots just use hard-coded behavior trees. It’s not artificial intelligence in the academic sense, because it’s just following a human-made script, but it’s still a bot.

Then there are software systems that are just software systems with a machine learning model in there somewhere. Product suggestions on Amazon, search results on Google, the order of your news stories on Facebook. Those are all powered by artificial intelligence in the sense that machine learning models help generate the results. But you wouldn’t call them an AI, or even a bot.

So it depends on what you’re calling an artificial intelligence to begin with. If you want to be safe, just call it what it is: software.

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