I took an Intro AI class in college (a broad ML class with some other techniques thrown in) and to be honest, I found it incredibly boring. I don't mean this to be a dig at the field, but I just thought I'd share my personal feelings. I didn't much enjoy the process that ML required but the end result was fairly cool (though not personally rewarding enough to be worth the process).
Distributed Systems was far more fascinating in my opinion.
This has generally been my experience too, the results of AI are cool and exciting, but the programming side often ends up dull and boring - accentuated by the "I have no idea why tuning that parameter worked" factor that happens in any complex AI system.
Introducing senses and movement - i.e., robotics - makes the boring parts worth it for me though.
Distributed Systems was far more fascinating in my opinion.