This obsession with defining everything is pointless

I can't remember who originally posted it, but someone once said "aiwars is a place where people come to disagree", and ironically I couldn't agree more -- especially when it comes to the obsessive need people seem to have with imposing rigid definitions on absolutely everything.

We're all desperately trying to fit an emerging paradigm into the comfortable boxes of our past understanding. AI is like nothing that has come before it, and yet we're constantly trying to force it into familiar categories, comparing AI apples to traditional oranges as if they need to be the same to have value or meaning.

Art, artist, tool, make, generate etc. It's all semantics. It's all surface level, and highly unlikely to alter how anyone on either side views or interacts with AI. It's just "here's how I've decided to define this word so it includes everything I like and excludes everything I don't" met with opposition from the other side. In many cases the terms we're arguing about are also either highly subjective, or poorly defined for the age of AI.

I'm not speaking to everyone here. I think there is interesting discussion that can emerge from these, but the vast majority of forced-definition-shitposting I've seen is just poorly crafted analogies about making sandwiches or pedantic technicalities that completely miss how this technology is actually being used in the real world.

Ultimately, even if you "win" the argument (which doesn't really happen here, see my opening line), what's the best case scenario? That we all continue to do exactly as we were doing just with different labels? Does that change anything?