How would you prefer people talk technology that allows machines to think, learn, and perform tasks that usually require human intelligence?
We could encode some behavior with mechanical automaton but we can encode far more behavior and more complex behavior with electronic computers. There's no known strict limit beyond computation to the complexity of behavior we can encode. Now with a fully digitized fruit fly brain one can theorize about a fully digitized human brain. What would we call this if not artificial intelligence? How about other models that encode approximate behavior to human level intelligence?
The term has linguistic meaning and isn't just marketing nonsense like calling food products all natural. That said there's definitely been a ramp up of people calling essentially if-else chains artificial intelligence, lots of abuse of the term.