Natural selection means "died before being able to reproduce". Darwin also specified sexual selection which means "unable (or less able) to find a mate or incapable (or less capable) of reproduction". Artificial selection is "humans intentionally fucked with their reproduction or genes to select for traits".

Ai could fall into any of the three depending on situation and perspective.

Ok, thanks for that.

The reason i ask this is because from my perspective I'm not sure anything humans do could be considered outside of nature.

We are part of it so anything we do is also part of it.

That's not to imply we aren't stupidly destructive sometimes, but even technology is still something we built, like tool-use apes or birds.

The difference is in magnitude, not in type.

There are plenty of creatures that affect the environment around them , with or without tool-use. Sometimes those actions destroy their own habitats, things like overpopulation or key resource exhaustion.

That we are currently the pinnacle of fucking up our own environment doesn't differentiate us from other natural creatures, other than scale.

Even the idea of sentience and sapience could be considered evolution of a sort.

Yes, we have greater understanding about our actions and the consequences, but that's only as a result of traits formed by evolutionary pressures, i wouldn't consider cognitive abilities to be outside of nature either.

To follow on from that, selective breeding, for instance, would still be natural selection because the environment in which is happens contains only natural elements.

People sometimes get upset at the idea that we aren't special enough to considered "above" or "outside" nature which i why i try and get their perspective first.