Weirdly I’d say it was the other way around. Late 90s marketing used “AI” to inflate basic decision trees whereas “AI” in the context of this gun running an ANN model is a better application of the term. I’m old though; AI has been a buzzword since the 80s when every org wanted their own expert system (all pitched/marketing as “AI”). There was so much groundwork for these “AIs” that never really came to be - like the whole Semantic Web movement with RDF in the late 90s and ontologists in every major org. And now you can practically replicate that with few-shot.

I’m not suggesting we’re near Data, far from it, but that AI has been a buzz word for a lot longer than people have noticed. It’s just a lot of the technology is now commodity and in consumer products, so the average person gets marketed to also. I remember pitches about the C128 and big orgs like GM swinging around AI for things like “it’s got more RAM” and “we’re using a database”.