> It turned out to be possible with fairly basic statistical text generation, because fooling humans is easy.

I don't think it is fair to call a GPT model "fairly basic statistical text generation" - a Markov Text Generator I'd agree can be called basic statistics, but they are not fooling any humans in a Turing test.

> It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning.

No, AI would absolutely be apt for describing a computing reasoning like a child