I think there’s nuance to be had here. Terms have been overloaded, and individuals aren’t necessarily acting in bad faith. ML can be considered to be a subset of AI.
That being said, ML is extremely boring to me, and I really do think a lot of the research is an enormous grift. Hop on the bandwagon, read a stats book, flagrantly plagiarize it, submit to CS journal that no statisticians read, publish and don’t perish, rinse, repeat.
It feels like society has spent billions of dollars on bad academics continuously reinventing applied statistics over and over again, but now with Big Data and a brand refresh! It’s like a whole generation of academics watched one too many terrible Hollywood remakes. It broke their brains, and now they’re only doing remakes too.
They ran out of statistics content to steal, so now the latest and greatest thing is plagiarizing classical AI works from the late 20th century and calling it “reinforcement learning.”
It’s all very frustrating. We could’ve funded a Manhattan project for fusion power, but instead thousands of our most brilliant people are wasting their time and humanity’s carbon budget to create the most powerful spambot ever.
