ML is a lot more accurate to what many of these current 'AI' products do anyway. The AI wave is ultimately about branding more so than any particular threshold of ability.

I think you're right - if there is a large AI crash that sours people on the term for a while, most of these products are just gonna stick around in some more marketable format.

Looking back at industry people pretending like ChatGPT was some frighteningly intelligent very-nearly-general-intelligence type of thing, you kinda wonder if they were deliberately doing a marketing stunt or just bought their own hype.