Your acquaintances aren't changing their minds because the arguments are weak. Both the article and your comment assume that the only mode of interaction for natural language is a very high level description of programmer intent.

You can interact with AI and say "code me a calculator" or "now declare a array of booleans to map to each of the keys in the UI and set the corresponding array position to true when the key is pressed".

These commands are written in natural language at such different levels of abstraction that is hard to put them in the same bucket. It would be fair to call the latter an imperative language with the LLM in the role of a compiler. That's very similar to how I use AI.