This is because the AI of today is a shit sandwich that we’re being told is peanut butter and jelly.
For those who like to party: All the current “AI” technologies use statistics to approximate semantics. They can’t just be semantic, because we don’t know how meaning works or what gives rise to it. So the public is put off because they have an intuitive sense of the ruse.
As long as the mechanics of meaning remain a mystery, “AI” will be parlor tricks.
And I don’t mean to denigrate data science. It is important and powerful. And real machine intelligence may one day emerge from it (or data science may one day point the way). But data science just isn’t AI.