I mean just about every thing was AI at one point; program synthesis was seen as AI (like in the 70s) right up until it wasn't after we effectively encoded it i

I mean just about every thing was AI at one point; program synthesis was seen as AI (like in the 70s) right up until it wasn't after we effectively encoded it into programming languages. For example lisp it self was effectively AI research as well. In computer science it's pretty typical to refer to things as AI right up until we understand how to engineer it; the history of email that was posted recently is a great example (at first we just had computers extracting features and learning things, and it was vague and generic; these days we understand the system as a reputation network, and we understand the details of each of the features because it required a bunch of engineering to make that specific solution scale and fast).