I wasn’t playing Soul Caliber on the Dreamcast against AI openents…

Maybe terminology differs by region, but I absolutely played against AI as a kid. When I set up a game of Command and Conquer or something, I’d pick the number of AI opponents. Sometimes we’d call them bots (more common in FPS) or “the computer” or “CPU” (esp in Civ and other TBS), but I distinctly remember calling RTS SP opponents “AI” and I think many games used that terminology during the 90s.

What frustrates me is the opposite of what you’re saying, people have changed the meaning of “AI” from a human programmed opponent to a statistical model. When I played against “AI” 20-30 years ago, I was playing against something a human crafted and tuned. These days, I don’t play against “AI” because “AI” generates text, images, and video from a statistical model and can’t really play games. AI is something that runs in the cloud, with maybe a small portion on phones and Windows computers to do simple tasks where the network would add too much latency.