I don’t think you know what AI is. A bunch of if statements can, in fact, constitute an AI depending on the context. You don’t know what you’re talking about, stop trying to pretend you do.

AI is a broad concept, a pathfinding algorithm can be considered AI, a machine learning image generator can be considered AI, a shitty chatbot with predefined responses (like this one) can be considered AI. Reducing something to a stupid sentence like “just a bunch of if statements” to try to make it seem absurd is. I can reduce something like ChatGPT the same way and it’d be pretty much as accurate as your take.

You can draw any AI as a predefined flowchart, that’s literally the point, they just make decisions based off of data. Large NLP algorithms like ChatGPT are no exception, they’re just very large involving incomparably heavier mathematics.

This random article can explain it easily for you. https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-vs-machine-learning even this article can portray the many different usages of “artificial intelligence”, it gives multiple definitions none of which are wrong.

Here is a good stackoverflow answer to it too that actually gives credible sources (including from the people who pioneered AI themselves): https://stackoverflow.com/a/54793198

AI is very broad. You can use many different definitions of varying specificity to describe AI which can all be correct, even a shitty chatbot counts as AI despite being so basic. There’s no bottom limit for the complexity of AI.