Can you provide sources for this? Like, how many people thought chess or go were literally impossible for computers to play at superhuman level? I'm actually curious about the history, and I don't want us to accidentally attack a straw man.

To me, the fact that Turing wrote the first chess program in the 1950s suggests that people thought computers were capable of playing chess. It doesn't seem too great a leap to imagine that they'd be open to the idea that a supercomputer could play superhuman chess.

It humors me, that we still talk about playing chess when we talk about socalled AI.

That's how long we've come. Playing chess. On a superhuman level. Wow. What is superhuman anyways?

No one shifted the goal post whatsoever in those cases. We've had computers that could beat humans in video games, and board games for decades. Improving those so they could beat better players was not thought to be impossible.

The same goes for writing text articles. Go on any /r/politics thread you'll surely see bots writing text that does a good job of convincing people that it was human written. So slightly, or even significantly, improving those is not something that people doubted would be possible.