alt Hacker NewsI believe the Butlerian Jihad caused a ban for "thinking machines" with a tenet of "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." This to me at least points at a ban for things that behave or feel like a human, not on the underlying math. An ornithopter probably has some fancy AI-esque flight stabilization, but it isn't expressed in a human way. The same goes for function approximators and surrogate models, no one would do the things we see people doing with AIs today, letting them talk them into heinous acts or fall in love with them.
That being said I can very much recommend the two Hyperion books for a good look at AI and co-dependence in sci-fi.
It'll have flight stabilization and controls and the like, but those things predate and / or do not need AI; AI algorithms are too expensive and slow for realtime flight control things. Some of those were traditionally done mechanically, even.