"AI" to most laypeople means LLMs and imagegen. They have no clue that anyone with an iPhone has been using "AI" since iOS 15(?) when it got stuff like photo object selection, instant OCR and voice isolation.
We can readopt Machine Learning for the other algorithms, which is significantly better, but still not without flaws. I hope we go further down and just say statistical inference, and if we want to be any more specific and just say which algorithm we are using (supervised learning, Markov Chains, Kalman filter, etc.)
The dark night of the soul will be sublime.