The Hopfield model is not doing pattern recognition or classification. It only does pattern completion: you give a noisy image or an image with missing pixels as input and it outputs the original (stored) image. Hence, the Hopfield model and artificial neural networks (ANN) do not solve the same problem.
ANN are not meant to model associative memory.
A question closely related to your question is "what does the brain do when it recognizes an object in an image ?". Pattern classification ? Pattern completion ? Some scientists have focused on the ANN perspective (James DiCarlo for example) and others on the Hopfield network perspective (Daniel Amit and his former students/collaborators for example). These questions are still open and subject of intensive investigation.
