Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"? How about voice recognition, used daily all over the world? What about spam filters? Clearly useless over hyped technology right?
Even if you wanted to limit the term AI to large language models, which by the way, would make your use of the term incredibly wrong, it STILL has many common and useful application. You can use LLMs to classify text (sentiment, toxicity, etc), they can be paired with voice models to improve speech recognition or improve translation services, and so on.
I think it's better to ask what you think the major similarity is between AI and crypto, because it's hard to find any other than a subset of the crypto fanatics now jumping on LLMs as the solution to every problem. But this group isn't actually part of the AI community.
OCR is a technology.
Cryptocoins are a community. The _SAME_ people who pushed crypto have now moved into the AI sphere and are hawking AI.
Its like all the snake oil salesmen of the 1800s suddenly discovered that cars are selling and have become car salesmen. That doesn't mean that cars are a scam, it means that many, many people trying to sell cars to you are scammers.
Having our guard up against hucksters, especially when the great community of hucksters are obviously moving in lockstep to say the same thing (and coordinate their arguments thanks to the internet / meme culture), it makes it easy to pick out when to be on guard.
But AI isn't a scam, that's their point. The more opt comparison here may be to horse buggies instead of snake oil. We probably will inevitable move more towards generative content, and everyone's trying to find their place as livelihoods are being impacted.
And of course there's the legalities of what's used to train AI. Crypto was completely decoupled and economic concepts aren't exactly copyright to begin with. So this doesn't apply much here.