You are right. My pet peeve is that it is now used as a marketing term without actual meeting. Used to be the word smart. Now instead of “buy this smart toaster”, “buy this AI powered toaster”. Sorry if this reply was too verbose for your liking.

Perhaps, we should consider not calling all of them as AI. Machine learning is a useful tool.

Dogs are can be also better at detecting cancer than humans. And dogs tend to hallucinate less

You can use Perplexica instead, which is a self-hosted open source alternative to Perplexity.