If you want to lean into the lie, you do you. I will not.

Kind of, but I wouldn't exactly put it like that since AI has never meant anything more than automated intelligence/decision making of some sort. The bar isn't moving, just this almost meaningless label is just forever getting slapped on the latest shiny new thing.

You could legitimately call a thermostat "AI". Expert systems were previously called AI. Today it's Large Language Models. Tomorrow it'll be something else.

I think the issue is that technologists use the term AI to mean one thing, which is something we've had since the 60s with lisp, forth, and prolog. And the average person uses AI to mean something more like Data from Star Trek, which we don't have and may or may not have this century. We're all talking past each other.

There is no rigorous definition of intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence. What you're referring to is people simply not knowing what they're talking about.

More to the point, there has always been a cottage industry in predicting an amazing future, just around the corner. 'AGI' is just the latest incarnation.