Yeah, they're complaining about a technicality. Using the word "AI" to refer to LLMs or to generative AI is just common parlance. That definition changes every few years. Five years ago, neural networks were referred to as "AI" and a few decades ago, the AIs stealing our jobs were calculators. This is known as the AI effect.
Among experts, "AI" describes a whole research field with a myriad of applications, of which image recognition is definitely one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence