I guess the original point was that machine learning is nothing like actual intelligence, it is closer to a process of artificial model creation than anything else. "Artificial intelligence" is a term that's completely abused these days.
Well, machine learning might not enlighten us to understand actual intelligence. There is no reason why actual intelligence can't simply be modeled by (and function like) a giant neural network. Many of us hope there is some form of symbolic intelligence deeper than just stochastic models or neural nets, but we really don't know.
> Machine Learning was certainly considered a part of AI then
That's part of the problem. The definition of AI is extremely loose. If by AI we actually mean "replicating the process of human intelligence through algorithms" then Machine Learning is certainly not it.