As someone who worked in rules-based ML before the recent transformers (and unsupervised learning in general) hype, rules-based approaches were laughably bad. Only now are nondeterministic approaches to ML surpassing human level tasks, something which would not have been feasible, perhaps not even possible in a finite amount of human development time, via human-created rules.
The thing is that AI is completely unpredictable without human curated results. Stable diffusion made me relent and admit that AI is here now for real, but I no longer think so. It's more like artificial schizophrenia. It does have some results, often plausible seeming results, but it's not real.
