I see it as a double edged sword. People that want the category of AI to succeed can claim a victory when someone uses it to approximate protien folding and invent new drugs. But that also means the entire field is constantly being dragged down by low quality vibe coded sites, slop videos on social media, whatever horrific thing Grok is doing this week, etc.
We need to remember what "Artificial Intelligence" actually means. It refers to the field of research starting in the 1950's developing algorithms related to combinatorial search, planning, and reasoning. Machine Learning isn't AI in the sci-fi movie sense, but it's among the topics you'll find in a textbook like Russell and Norvig.
A problem like protein folding isn't tangentially related to AI, it's at the heart of the kinds of problems the field has been trying to tackle for decades. Yet when there are legitimate breakthroughs, people deride it as "not real AI."
AI is the sum of all of these groups. Also, the "not real AI" thing is more about not real AGI. That's a very different target.
AGI isn't a well-defined concept. So when people say something isn't "real AI" because it's not AGI, I can't take them seriously because they're implying that everything the field has worked on for the past 70 years isn't real AI.