I spoke to him about it after and he said something like: if it looks intelligent to the user, and it’s done by a computer, the user sees it as artificial intelligence, since they don’t care about the underlying tech that drives it. Just how startups often manually process the first few customers requests or get mechanical Turk to do something. Users just see the end result and don’t really know or care if it was implemented by a mess of if statements, machine learning, or magical fairy dust. They just see a machine acting in ways that seem intelligent.

Of course that very much muddies and dilutes the terminology, but AI was always an imprecise and badly defined term and, as was pointed out, earlier AI techniques wouldn’t be seen as that nowadays: by todays standard, I wouldn’t consider expert systems or minmax tree search or whatever as AI, but once upon a time, when the term was coined, it certainly was.