NPCs have had AI since before GoldenEye.

It’s almost like you’ve never played a video game before.

We’ve been calling enemy logic “AI” since at least the late 1980s. It again has nothing to do with ML, and no we do not need to all change for you because you decided to allow yourself to overreact.

The game industry has been calling that stuff AI for like nearly 40 years man.

LLMs need to stop using the term AI, there's more intelligence in a Half life npc than in a llm.

If you were being properly pendantic, you'd realize that the term AI has existed for fucking decades prior to the current LLM boom and even machine learning, and has regularly and repeatedly been used to describe the type of (comparatively) simple algorithms used to manage NPC actions in video games.

You may also know that Valve recieved a shit ton of press praise for the complexity of the algorithms and tricks they used to give their NPCs life in a large number of their previous games. Simulating predator/prey dynamics in aliens, command structure in soldiers, and even making the appearance of troops communicating information audibly (both human soldiers and aliens having specific phrases and sounds for different situations) all in Half Life 1.

With Half Life 2, they made a large stride pushing back against the uncanny valley through how they managed facial animations. They also made groundbreaking use of pathing nodes with different contexts which allowed NPCs to build off the communication and dynamically flank you (outside of the previously common scripted set pieces). Also some stuff that's escaping me right now with player led platoons.

In Left 4 Dead, they used one set of algorithms to direct the overall PvE match flow, a separate one to handle large groups of enemies as a group, and then even more to manage individual enemy entities when they were close enough to players. Again, groundbreaking for the time, with many PvE and horde defense games since adopting similar "director" algorithms.

In every single aritcle written about this shit, the term AI was used. In articles about monsters in the original DOOM, the term AI was used.

Effectively "it was our word first".