Wouldn’t a heuristic score be AI? It could very probably *not* be an LLM or Stable Diffusion or similar which has coopted the overall term “AI”; but that doesn’t make it not an expert system, or an SLM used for categorization, or even A* search, all of which fell under the umbrella of “AI” for a long time.

I assure you, they still do.

Artificial Intelligence is a thriving and active discipline of the Computer Science field.

It includes things like A* search and expert systems even now, despite current popular parlance shoving LLMs into the spotlight as "AI" and implying that that's all the term means.

A heuristic can be a single if statement.

Heuristics are just rules of thumb without necessarily having a rigid law or clean classification.

You can derive heuristics from mathematically modeling something or even applying machine learning, but they need not necessarily involve either set of techniques.