There's a distinction to be drawn, certainly. If you walk into a university CS department, entry-level AI and ML are likely to be separate entries on the class

There's a distinction to be drawn, certainly. If you walk into a university CS department, entry-level AI and ML are likely to be separate entries on the class roster, and you can make useful predictions about what you'll find in each course. But the complaint is that "computer intelligence" is the same sort of god-of-the-gaps concept as "human intelligence". Is tool use strictly human? Tool invention? Meta-tool use? Observational learning? Language? Coining new words? In the same way that the list of human-only behaviors has spent a century in retreat, the tasks which constitute "intelligent behavior" in computers are fundamentally undefined, and outside of the Turing Test they mostly consist of whatever problems appear at least 5-10 years out of reach. "ML techniques" is literally synonymous with AI, obviously. One is a group of algorithms, the other's an abstract concept. But a great many tasks currently handled under the label ML would have been widely accepted as "AI problems" very recently. A computer winning Jeopardy would have sounded like a shocking AI advance in 1997 when Deep Blue won, let alone in 1964 when the show debuted. In 2011, people scrambled to be fastest and most scathing in labelling it "not real intelligence" and mocking it for mistakes smaller than many human errors. The difference is usually semantic, and some responsibility for the sliding definition certainly lies with hype-happy journalists and over-optimistic AI researchers. (Had Watson won Jeopardy back in 1980, it would have roughly matched Minsky and Simon's predicted timelines.) But that distinction is increasingly used for the very specific equivocation which enables this article. "AI isn't doing that", meaning "it's ML instead", is conflated with "AI isn't doing that" meaning "that isn't happening". If AI doesn't take your job, but a deep-learning network developed by AI researchers does, it seems pretty fair to complain that the two terms aren't actually distinct.