In 1990 Canon shipped the NP-9800, an 83-copies-a-minute departmental workhorse announced as the world’s first high-speed copier to use fuzzy logic — a control system, not a metaphor, that let the machine reason in degrees rather than binary switches and self-tune exposure and image density against whatever original landed on the glass. The brochure reached for “thinks for itself,” and a trade press hungry for a hook obliged. Fuzzy logic was, at the time, a genuinely fashionable branch of control engineering, borrowed from consumer electronics — rice cookers, washing machines, camera autofocus — and applied here to a problem plain-paper copying had never solved: consistent quality across inconsistent originals. The engineering was real. The prose ran slightly ahead of it.

Thirty-four years later, in August 2024, Xerox announced the AltaLink C8200 and B8200 series, and its own trade coverage ran the headline this feature borrows outright: the AI-powered AltaLink. The phrase is Xerox’s marketing language, not the register’s paraphrase, and underneath it sits a checkable claim — the C8230 through C8270 ship, as standard, with AI-assisted redaction, a document summariser and a note-to-text converter built into the ConnectKey platform. Redaction requires recognising what a name or an account number looks like inside a scanned page; summarising requires parsing a document’s structure; the note converter requires handwriting recognition. None of that is decorative — it is, in the fuzzy-logic sense, the same trick one generation on: a control system reasoning about ambiguous input instead of following a fixed rule.

Canon’s own 2025 flagship, the imageFORCE C5100, arrives in its catalogue simply as “AI-enabled,” a label the source material never unpacks — no named function, nothing to verify the way AltaLink’s redaction app can be verified. That gap is not an accusation; it is the reason to run a register instead of reprinting a press release. Konica Minolta’s contemporaneous A3 range does not reach for the phrase at all: its 2020-generation flagship shipped an “intelligent media sensor” that auto-detects paper type, a useful piece of automatic classification nobody in the company’s literature has bothered to rebadge as artificial intelligence. Three manufacturers, three positions, one trade year. Where a claim can be checked against a named capability, the register checks it. Where it cannot, it says so.

The thesis, stated once: fuzzy logic and “AI-powered” are the same marketing muscle exercising itself a generation apart, and both generations genuinely did some of what they claimed. What changed was not the industry’s honesty so much as the size of the word available to describe it. The research department notes, in the interest of not throwing stones from inside a glass press room, that this edition was itself compiled with considerable machine assistance — research, drafting, layout, the lot — and sees no particular reason to be smug about the difference between a copier that reasons about toner density and a research department that reasons about copiers. Both, on a good day, get the exposure right.