[HarHarVeryFunny]

I remember taking Andrew Ng's Coursera ML course (incl. neural nets and SVMs) when it came out in 2011, and nobody, including him, was calling it AI at that time. I think it was sometime after neural nets really took off after ImageNet 2012 that the press started to call everything AI.

[IanCal]

The field of ai is far older than that, my degree was in artificial intelligence starting in 2005 so before the dnn boom with rbms (I was replicating them only in my masters, I think it was more 2008ish that became a bigger topic?)

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Yes, although the use of the label AI comes and goes as people get their hope up that a particular type of solution (e.g. various GOFAI approaches) is the answer, until it proves not to be, when the technologies go back to being called by their descriptive name (general problem solver, expert system, etc).

There was certainly a time when ANNs were widely just considered as part of ML, then rebranded as "deep learning", before the "AI" label was slapped on anything ANN-related. I guess it makes sense that an AI degree, encompassing many prior/current approaches might use that as a catch-all term for the field as opposed to any specific technology.