[wsgeorge]

"It's just pattern matching"

Is there a name for when someone says "X is not really Y, but it is rather <mentions lower-level mechanism employed by X to achieve Y>"?

Because that's what I'm seeing in this post, and I don't think it makes your argument strong.

[mindcrime]

In this specific context, this phenomenon is so common that it literally has the name "The AI Effect".[1]

Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

[ttctciyf]

Nothing Buttery or, newer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism

The gulf between the notion of machine intelligence fostered by unthinking use of "AI" terminology and the reality of the rudderless productions of generative AI, which provide only a semblance of intelligence (when the stars are aligned) is real enough, though, IMO.