The term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds. Understanding the shape in a image, reading the text from a photo can also be considered AI.

Extracting characters from an image and comparing them to a database of known fonts using a naive distance metric can be called AI? Really?

The key term here is mimics - to be classified as intelligent, the an algorithm should be able to significantly mimic human level intelligence in your domain. For example if your algorithm could read human handwriting and predict what font it was written in, or maybe what font it's closely related to, is something that's closer to the AI bandwagon.

But that doesn't make it 'an AI'. That's a subtle difference but it matters.

See also https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

What The Font has been good to me in this past.

https://www.whatfontis.com/ as well, though it presents an irritating survey you have to decline to see the results.

This certainly sounds like an AI application. Do you have some reason to think it isn't?

It uses OCR then compares what it find with everything in the database. It doesn’t “learn” anything from what it finds; in fact you can’t even train it because it uses a static database.

Yes, it is a necessary part of an AI, but I still wouldn't dare to call it an "AI Algorithm". Overuse of the term poisons the actual AI research field, it's only use is to aid click bait.

It is AI, it is just that not everything called AI is really interesting anymore. This should have attracted interest in the 80's.