The word artificial intelligence was coined in a 1955 research proposal [1] which listed seven aspects of the "artificial intelligence problem". Computers using languages was one of them. Another is "neuron nets", which would indeed encompass a large part of ML and at least Google Translate since circa 2016 [2].

This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches.

And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches

1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...