The whole "all AI bad" is disconnected and primitivism.
John J. Hopfield work is SCIENCE with caps. A decade of investigations during the 80s when computational power couldn't really do much with their models. And now it has been shown that those models work really good given proper computational power.
Also not all AI is generative AI that takes money out of fanfic drawers pockets or an useless hallucinating chatbot. Neural networks are commonly used in science as a very useful tool for many tasks. Also image recognition is nowadays practically a solved issue thanks to their research. Proteins folding. Dataset reduction. Fluent text to speech. Speech recognition...
AI may be getting more track nowadays because the generative AIs (that also have their own merit, like or not) but there is much more to it.
As any technological advance there are shitty use cases and good use cases. You cannot condemn a whole tech just for the shitty uses of some greedy capitalists. Well.. you can condemn it. But then I will classify you as a primitivist.
Scientific theory that resulted in practical applications useful to people is why the nobel prize was created to begin with. So it is a well given prize. More so than many others.
I'm still waiting for the full-planet weather model. That will be something.
That's going to be a hard one, given that past weather patterns are increasingly not predictive of future weather patterns, because something keeps dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and raising the global temperature
Generative AI is part to AI. And it has its own merits. Very big merits. Like or not it is a milestone on the field. That it is mostly hated not because it doesn't work but because it does.
If generative AI could not create images the way it does I assure you we wouldn't have the legion of etsy and patreon painters complaining about it.
The nobel prize is not to generative AI, of course, it's about the fathers of the fields and their complex neural networks that made most advanced since then possible.
It has been called like that since the 50s were it could do literally nothing because computer power wasn't enough.
It is the field that leads to an artificially created intelligence. We never had any issues with the name. No need for a rebrand.