AI is young, and at the center of the industry spotlight, so it attracts a lot of people who are not in it to understand anything. It's like when the whole world got on the Internet, and the culture suddenly shifted. It's a good thing; you just have to dress up your work in the right language, and you can get funding, like when Richard Bellman coined the term "dynamic programming" to make it palatable to the Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson.
Or 1949 if you consider the Turing Test, or 1912 if you consider Torres Quevedo's machine El Ajedrecista that plays rook endings. The illusion of AI dates back to 1770's The Turk.
"[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." - Ada Lovelace, 1842
