The answer you’re referring to (not the accepted answer but the highest voted yes) also says
Tic-Tac-Toe is a very simple game, so it is very easy to make a simple application behave exactly the same as an intelligent human would. So, if this is the definition of artificial intelligence to which you subscribe, then yes, you would be justified in calling your “jumble of if/else statements” an AI.
In this case I feel like it is a safe, if somewhat useless, application of the term.
The ambiguity arises when you ask what it means for “if a human behaves the same way”. If you word it like that then something like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion wouldn’t count, because you can easily see they’re not human even if you didn’t know first, but then this tic-tac-toe bot would count. It’s a definition they didn’t elaborate on enough so we don’t know what they mean by “intelligent human behaviour”. Maybe “intelligent human behaviour” extends to just giving somewhat relevant answers based on certain words/lexemes in the sentence? Certainly that intelligence is human, I mean a dog or seal can’t do that, only a human. As it stands there is no complex art or chat AI that can’t be distinguished from a human, so if we want to restrict it to actually acting like a human then AI doesn’t exist, unless we’re talking about simple tasks like tic-tac-toe, and there are programs that surpass humans like chess engines which also wouldn’t be considered AI, which I find a silly definition to go by. “Human intelligence” doesn’t mean “as smart as the average human”, it means sentient-like capacity to make decisions, even if it’s extremely simple. The task itself doesn’t change what counts.
That is why I find the take by the pioneers of AI a lot more useful – they don’t put some arbitrary subjective limit on complexity that disqualifues seemingly obvious examples of AI like the IEEE’s ambiguously worded definition does.
What’s in “these days” doesn’t exactly matter – sure, average people nowadays often only use AI to mean complex ML/NLP AI and not the other types of AI, but that doesn’t stop other AI from existing and being AI lol. And especially since people use it the previously common way too still – people who play video games will still call the bots/NPCs “AI”, or call the pathfinding algorithm “pathfinding AI”, for example. And a majority of data science/AI literature will still call simple AI like this one in the post “AI”.
It’s easy to see why asserting your poor definition of AI as the correct one and anything else (even the definition that most professionals in AI agree to, which the comment I sent has a link to multiple with reasons to their credibility over others, one is literally the 4th most cited book in this century) as “misleading” is pretty annoying. You’re trying to gatekeep AI and put your own subjective interperetation of one specific definition on it and ignore multiple leading AI professionals’ definitions lol…