I'm always confused because they've seen special effects for decades, and now the very same explosions, filters, etc, cgi is suddenly AI.
It's automated. It's based on information. Why is it not intelligent. Why is it demonstrably less intelligent than an LLM which may make no attempt to retrieve information from other sources but merely has what it was created with.
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.
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.