Such a wrong take. Decision trees are nothing more than if statements. Fancier versions of those (random forests) are consistently near SOTA algorithms like neural networks (and beat them on tabular datasets frequently). AI can be just a shit ton of if/else statements.

If-then statements are definitely AI, and A* is also a bunch of if-then statements.

It's kinda cool that we get to interact with the final arbiter of the bounds of the term "academic AI".