Are people really this hung up on the term “AI”? Who cares? The fact that this is a shockingly useful piece of technology has nothing to do with what it’s called.
Because the AI term makes people anthropomorphize those tools.
They "hallucinate", they "know", they "think".
They're just the result of matrix calculus on which your own pattern recognition capacities fool you into thinking there is intelligence there. There isn't. They don't hallucinate, their output is wrong.
The worst example I've seen of anthropomorphism was the blog from a searcher working on adverse prompting. The tool spewing "help me" words made them think they were hurting a living organism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnYnCFgT3hF6LJPwn/why-white-...
Speaking with AI proponents feels like speaking with cryptocurrencies proponents: the more you learn about how things work, the more you understand they don't and just live in lalaland.
If you lived before the invention of cars, and if when they were invented, marketers all said "these will be able to fly soon" (which of course, we know now wouldn't have been true), you would be underwhelmed? You wouldn't think it was extremely transformative technology?