I beg you, stop calling everything AI

"AI". Reading these two letters will immediately put a certain image in your head. Well, maybe unless you're reading this far in the future. In that case: Hello, digital archeologists, I hope you're having a great day! If you're in 2026, however, chances are, you're thinking about slop-generators, like ChatGPT or Midjourney. Or if you're from the tech space yourself, perhaps Claude. Now, I'm sparing you the rant about how these tools come with drawbacks the size of the sun compared to equally astronomically tiny benefits. Or why I'm calling them slop-generators. For now, at least. Others have done that much better already. But there's one thing I do want to rant about: how these slop-generators give legitimate tools a bad rep.

Ever since the people with money decided that they will from now on exclusively invest in things connected to the vague label "AI", everyone else was left to figure out how to survive in this market. The answer for many edeavours seeking funding is pretty easy: Everything is "AI" now! Problem solved!

"AI is transforming weather-forecasting" now. Or healthcare, or astronomy. The press is full of how "AI" revolutionises all kinds of fields. Additionally, product marketers take full advantage. Your vaccuum robot that had image recognition for obstacles before ChatGPT was even a thing? It's AI-powered! The search for visually similar images on your classifieds app? Driven by AI! Your favourite image editor? Now AI-first! Self-driving cars? All made possible through the amazing power of AI.

There's just one problem: it's a lie. Or at least a gross misrepresentation. The average person out there has been trained by the hype machine to think "AI" = "ChatGPT". So nowadays, these messages are widely understood as: Oh, ChatGPT made medicine better! or Thanks to ChatGPT, we now have better weather forecasts! But that is just not true. Yes, there have been amazing advances in these fields. But very few, if any, rely on generative AI. They usually rely on other machine-learning techniques, many of which have been around far longer than generative AI. And we used to call those "machine-learning", until "AI" came along and made the use of every other terminology very unprofitable. So now there's only "AI" left and every advance in any machine-learning field will be attributed to it, and by extension to generative AI, because the tech industry has spent billions to teach the general public that AI means slop-generators. So now the slop-generators get the credit for genuinely useful advances in very valid scientific applications. Fantastic.

On the other hand, I've recently started seeing it work in the other direction as well. Look at this post on BlueSky by Kenney.nl, which actually prompted me to write about this issue now. With anti-AI sentiment growing stronger, people are mis-identifying any use of a software behaving somewhat smart as use of generative AI. If you don't have Bluesky: Here, a reviewer is saying they refunded the game, because it uses generative AI to suggest a name for something. Kenney, the developer, who is also very anti Gen-AI, explains that the game simply picks one at random from a bunch of names from a list he wrote, a technique that has been around as long as there are computers. But that reviewer was concerned, had strong feelings about generative AI, and apparently they are unable to tell the difference. So now the slop-generators aren't only taking the credit they don't deserve, they give everyone else a bad reputation as well. Can't win in this stupid timeline.

As a slight tangent, the recent participation survey for the Global Game Jam 2026 included a question that asked how I feel about the use of AI for the jam. They, too, meant generative AI, but apparently didn't think that AI in game development has a very different meaning. Imagine playing a video game without any AI for computer-controlled actors, that'll be fun, right?

tl;dr

So I'm begging you, if you're talking about topics of machine-learning, please be specific with your wording. Try to teach people the nuances. Don't put the same "AI" sticker on every product that performs some advanced computing. Don't let ChatGPT steal the credit for some amazing machine-learning magic that's happening elsewhere! And don't think badly of any and all machine-learning, just because generative AI is ruining society, the planet, and generally taking the fun out of everything good. Some of it is genuinely exciting and worth supporting.

I got this css shine effect for the AI ad buzzwords from codepen.