That oughtn't be controversial, in fact I wouldn't even bother with 'on steroids', implying it's a slightly different/morphed thing. The way I learnt it (very slightly, at university, not a particular focus) it was abundantly clear it was just stats.
I bring the steroids thing up because it's only relatively recently that we've had the massive computing power at our finger tips that we do now. We discovered the foundations of our current ML techniques a relatively long time ago, it's only been recently that we've been able to throw data centers full of powerful GPUs and whatnot at them.
