I suppose you didn’t click the link I sent – either that, or you think you know better than some of the leading figures in the field of AI… it’s not “a long way from AI”, it IS AI in its design and its purpose. It’s misleading to assert that it isn’t AI because it doesn’t meet your arbitrary complexity standard.
I doubt you have any relavant experience in AI research or engineering based off of how you treat the concept of AI and even data science in general here… boiling the bot down to “just a series of if statements” – and then implying that lack of complexity makes it not an AI – is extremely naïve and is itself misleading, you can do that for anything, every program is ultimately just a bunch of if-else/goto and simple math operations. It’s just an attempt to conceptually reduce it so much that it seems absurd that it could be in the same category as more advanced AI. Despite the name, AI doesn’t have to meet some bar for “smartness”, it’s a ridiculously broad term and any program intended to mimic human behaviour falls under AI (no matter how poorly it does it).
You confidently and rudely/condescendingly asserted something that is very blatantly ignorant of the subject of AI, I find it reasonable for me to assume that you had no idea what you were talking about, and I find it reasonable to very plainly call you out.
Also you misused “equivocate”… it’s not a word used to compare two things, it means using double speak/speaking evasively, “to equivocate the two [AI vs. chatbots]” doesn’t mean anything. Did you mean “equate”?