That's not true. AI was widely used to refer to the decision systems and state machines that produced NPC behaviour in video games, and I'm sure many other things than just science fiction

Parsing used to be "AI". If you look at proceedings of old AI conferences you get this impression that anything interesting you might program a computer to do has passed through the field at some point.

Weren't they trying to parse human languages? I think that's still AI. And they didn't manage to, but what they tried ended up falling down to a more basic level of computer science.