No. AI and, what you’re more likely to be referring to, machine learning has had applications for decades. Basic work was used back into the '60s, mostly for quick things, and 1D data analysis was useful long before images (voice and stuff like biometrics). But there are many more types of AI. Bayesian networks (still in the learned category) were huge breakthroughs and still see a lot of use today. Decision trees, Markov chains, and first order logic are the most common video games AI and usually rely on expert tuning rather than learned results.

AI is a huge field that’s been around longer than you expected, and permeates a lot of tech. Image stuff is just the hot application since it’s deep learning based buff that started around 2009 with a bunch of papers that helped get actual beneficial learning in deeper models (I always thought it started roughly with Deep Boltzmann Machines, but there’s a lot of work in that era that chipped away at the problem). The real revolution was general purpose GPU programming getting to a state where these breakthroughs weren’t just theoretical.

Before that, we already used a lot of computer vision, and other techniques, learned and unlearned, for a lot of applications. Most of them would probably bore you, but there are a lot of safety critical anomaly detectors.

It really depends on what you call AI, but just to put things into context: XKCD 1425 was released in 2014. Compare that to the timeline of AI on Wikipedia.