Our lab’s auto pipetter is broken about 60% of the time, most days we just shut it off and reroute specimens to the workbenches to do it by hand because it’s faster than attempting to fix it or call customer service. Maybe once the good-for-nothing customer service repair phone line is replaced by AI it will actually function and be worth the half a million dollars we spent on this stupid machine, lol
I imagine it’s because all of these technologies combine to make a sci-fi-esque computer assistant that talks to you, and most pop culture depictions of AI are just computer assistants that talk to you. The language already existed before the technology, it already took root before we got the chance to call it anything else.