No that's not true.

I've worked at a company whose product involved some decently advanced computer vision, marketed as AI (which isn't incorrect).

I've also seen companies that were doing machine learning before the LLM boom, who remarketed their machine-learning-based product as AI (which isn't incorrect).

If you put AI on a project the average consumer will think it’s using ChatGPT or something like that

I mean I agree with you just that the popular perception of that word has changed