If machine learning were the broadly accepted term to refer to these techniques in society, the people who currently complain that "AI is misleading because they're not intelligent" would instead be complaining that "ML is misleading because they're not learning". I know this because I have already seen people complaining that ML is misleading because "they're not learning".
The reality is that no matter what structure the software takes, or what outputs it achieves, it can't falsify a fundamentally unfalsifiable belief that machines cannot be like people in ways that could imply any sort of social recognition of that status.
Ai is misleading because it's too broad and consumers confuse it as AGI which is far more powerful (and not yet possible). From a marketing perspective this is a feature, not a bug since it gives off the appearance of being a much bigger deal than it is.
Are we really going to pretend that marketing departments / companies aren't fully aware of and taking advantage of this misunderstanding? This just seems like common sense to me.
Intelligence covers everything from the behaviors of a single celled organism, to the meta organism of human society. There is no misunderstanding by marketing. Intelligence covers everything they are doing.
What we need is new words for behaviors that are much more focused to what the capabilities we want to achieve are.
The reality is that no matter what structure the software takes, or what outputs it achieves, it can't falsify a fundamentally unfalsifiable belief that machines cannot be like people in ways that could imply any sort of social recognition of that status.