But "AI" is the umbrella term for all of them. What you said is the equivalent of saying:

we really need to stop calling things "vehicles". There's cars, trucks, airplanes, submarines, and space shuttles and they've all been called vehicles, but functionally they have almost nothing to do with each other

All of the things you've mentioned are correctly referred to as AI, and since most people do not understand the nuances of neural networks vs hard coded algorithms (and anything in-between), AI is an acceptable term for something that demonstrates results that comes about from a computer "thinking" and making shaved intelligent decisions.

Btw, just about every image recognition system out there is a neural network itself or has a neural network in the processing chain.

Edit: fixed an autocorrect typo

I think you're fighting a losing battle.

AI = "magic", or like "synergy" and other buzzwords that will soon become bereft of all meaning as a result of people abusing it.

There's whole countries that refer to the entire internet itself as Facebook, once something takes root it ain't going anywhere

Computer vision is AI. If they literally want a robot eye to scan their cluttered pantry and figure out what is there, that'll require some hefty neural net.

Edit: seeing these downvotes and surprised at the tech illiteracy on lemmy. I thought this was a better informed community. Look for computer vision papers in CVPR, IJCNN, and AAAI and try to tell me that being able to understand the 3D world isn't AI.

Shouldn’t there be a catch all term to explain the broader scope of the specifics?

Science is a broad term for multiple different studies, vehicle is a broad term for cars and trucks.

Language is fluid, and there is plenty of terminology that is dumb or imprecise to someone in the field, but A-ok to the wider populace. "Cloud" is also not actually a formation of water droplets, but someone's else's datacenter, but to some people the cloud is everything from Gmail to AWS.

If I say AI today and most people associate the same thing with it (these days that usually means generative AI , i.e. mostly diffusion or transformer models) then that's fine for me. Call it Plumbus for all I care.