It totally is in my experience. I have literally sat in meetings pushing AI... but absolutely NO steering or discussion on what we ought to do with it. They will relabel related things that have existed for years as AI.
It's like instead of having a bunch of nails and needing a way to pound them in, we've been given a nail gun and a requirement to use it.
"But we sell balloons"
"Dont worry, the nail gun will make everything better"
Yes it definitely is. ML engineer here (not exclusively I'm more of a systems developer but I have ML certifications and have done ML projects), the current definition of "AI" is just marketing for LLMs which isn't the same as AI. It was redefined by OpenAI when they released ChatGPT back in 2022 to help drive momentum for their product. Before 2022 AI meant something along the lines of artificial sentience
Always has been. The moment anyone understands "AI" is the moment they realize it isn't intelligent at all. It's just good at finding the right words or patterns.