FWIW, here's my take.
0: "AI" means three things nowadays: neural nets, machine learning, and LLM stuff. They are different things.
1: There was a paper in Science last year in which Materials Science types were doing some seriously kewl work on systems with 5 different metals using "machine learning" (gradient descent search in high dimensional spaces). And calling it AI.
2: The Econ. grad student didn't understand this and thought they were doing LLM stuff. Oops.