The word "actual" is doing a lot of lifting there. Artificial intelligence has existed for decades. Presumably you mean "artificial general intelligence", whatever that's even supposed to mean (it's subjective, and for many people it's a matter of literal religious faith that humans have something called souls which machines can never possibly emulate, and therefore "actual AI" is literally impossible as far as they're concerned.) Well anyway... if you want to say AGI, just say AGI. AI is more general than that and the term is well established to encompass a great many methods and kinds of systems. Many kinds of AI are very primitive and seem trivial today; they are nonetheless "actual AI".
It's not "sloppy use of words", both the term and the practice of AI have been around for far longer than today's probabilistic models. In particular, decision trees and similar are some of the simplest forms of AI.
The difference between an AI and a "regular" bunch of if/else statements is, in my opinion, the ease of adding new rules to the system. That's why something like Prolog counts as AI.
With a technical audience, it is better to use actual terminology.
However the general public does not have the knowledge to understand these. These are the people using ChatGPT and for them it is AI. We can correct them, but it's likely they won't care.
The general public is being misled with overwrought appeals to emotion and misused terms applied in a deliberately overbroad manner. AI may contain algorithms but an algorithm is not AI.
Social media feed algorithms are bad, and the public is awakening to the damage they cause. But they are not AI. As Yan LeCun pointed out recently, AI is actually the solution to the problems created by "algorithms."
The word "actual" is doing a lot of lifting there. Artificial intelligence has existed for decades. Presumably you mean "artificial general intelligence", whatever that's even supposed to mean (it's subjective, and for many people it's a matter of literal religious faith that humans have something called souls which machines can never possibly emulate, and therefore "actual AI" is literally impossible as far as they're concerned.) Well anyway... if you want to say AGI, just say AGI. AI is more general than that and the term is well established to encompass a great many methods and kinds of systems. Many kinds of AI are very primitive and seem trivial today; they are nonetheless "actual AI".