I work a lot with AI and in my game I have different types of AI (flying, ground, shooting when on sight, enemies that don't damage you when you touch them, ect) that are tweaked differently (Different HP for each, ect) and all I use is a single Sprite object (I only use families for the different enemy skins).
It's all to do with variables, baby! Unless I'm misunderstanding what the idea here is <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />