When a layman is complaining about Auto-Tune, they're almost always referring to the super-corrected version where a voice will snap to the tonal "gridlines" perfectly.

Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit.

Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.