it's true, to some extent AI research is "whatever AI researchers do". whereas if work tackling similar problems is done by PL theory, operations research, or w

it's true, to some extent AI research is "whatever AI researchers do". whereas if work tackling similar problems is done by PL theory, operations research, or whoever, it's no longer AI. of course this goes both ways; during the AI winter everyone doing AI research was scrambling to rebrand themselves as doing OR, optimization, computer vision, etc. and there is still a difference in the terminology and conceptual tools. look at the problem of ensuring that a system will output values that satisfy some constraints. classically there was a lot of work on constraint solving by people who called themselves AI researchers. meanwhile operations research people worked on integer programming approaches to the same problem. and PL theory people work with abstract interpretations.