This distinction is good in academic circles and similar (like on here). But the public (and ordinary people who aren't people who regularly visit Hacker News -- or even know that Hacker News exists) don't care. To them, AI == inequality and inequality accelerants, because it is funded and run by the richest, most powerful people on Earth. And those very people are making everything worse for all but them, not better. Nobody is going to care about academic distinctions in such circumstances.

It's because the consequences of AI is so direct and obvious, and also faster, where the inequality and job losses from other tech advances are just less direct.

That is, it's not hard to see why so many main streets in smaller towns have boarded up retail stores since you can now get anything in about a day (max) from Amazon. But Amazon (and other Internet giants) always played at least semi-plausible lip service that they were a boon to small fry (see Amazon's FBA commercials, for example). But you've got folks like Altman and Amodei gleefully saying how AI will be able to do all the work of a huge portion of (mostly high paying) jobs.

So it's not surprising that people are more up in arms about AI. And frankly, I don't think it really matters. Anger against "the tech elite" has been bubbling up for a long time now, and AI now just provides the most obvious target.