There’s a great Wikipedia article which is apt here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?wprov=sfti1

It’s perhaps best encapsulated by Douglas Hofstadter’s quip: “AI is whatever hasn't been done yet”.

The point being, AI is a moving target, and the threshold for reaching it migrates further which each new accomplishment in the field. If you showed the ML of today to someone in the sixties, you’d have a hard time convincing them it wasn’t AI.

But I don’t believe this is an issue reserved only for the press. At least anecdotally, practitioners don’t think of it this way either.