The term "Artificial Intelligence" was explictly not used in these fields for long stretches of time because the term got overhyped. The winter is coming.
Machine learning has taken huge leaps but the expectations for it are getting blown out of proportion. The use is going to increase for sure but there are many weaknesses in the technology that tend to be overlooked.
E.g. autonomous driving already proved too hard a task for ML for the foreseeable future. Also "hallucination" is a problem with no clear solution in sight.
I've seen hints of this in the past month or so: people who were acting like true general AI happened a year ago now just talking about it as "word generators".
Gemini felt like the tipping point where the flaws became obvious, which they then started noticing in the others.
Do you have any further reading on the idea that the term was explicitly avoided in those fields as a result of the AI winter?
I thought the academics kept on using the term, while commercial interests backed away during winter and came rushing back as soon as it was fashionable again.
The Wikipedia article mentions it: "Many researchers in AI in the mid 2000s deliberately called their work by other names, such as informatics, machine learning, analytics, knowledge-based systems, business rules management, cognitive systems, intelligent systems, intelligent agents or computational intelligence, to indicate that their work emphasizes particular tools or is directed at a particular sub-problem."
Also when I studied these things in the 2000s the program was called "Informatics".