Recognition and classification algorithms are quite good if features can be extracted that are invariant under the desired transformations. In the case of recognition in images, this is quite difficult because nothing is really invariant under projection and illumination change, so even recognizing identical objects can be extremely difficult. However, we have some stuff that works OK.
Artificial Intelligence is separate, and deals with the logical aspects of reasoning rather than interpretation of sensory information to recognize patterns etc. It is assumed that some other "hardware" has already processed this input and parsed it into more meaningful information tokens which can then be dealt with in a logic framework.
So far AI has yet to live up to its name. There is nothing that resembles true intelligence, creativity, or emotion -- actually, it is yet to be shown that this is even possible, as it may be nothing more than an illusion in humans. We do have machines that can solve simple planning problems, but only if those problems can be posed into a very formalized in rigid framework -- and we don't really have a good way of transforming observations into this logic framework. Because we don't have machines that can actually think, we can't even begin to work on adding things like spontaneity or creavity..although if we did have machines that could think, this would probably be a trivial addition. Instead what you may see are toy problems where randomness is used to give the cursory illusion of human-like qualities.