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.
Cryptocoins are a technology. Users of a particular cryptocoin protocol form a community.
Nah. Cryptocoin users fluidly switch between cryptocoins. You could be into... I dunno... Lunacoin... and by next week you'd have changed all your money into Mooncoin before anyone notices. In fact, I can pump Lunacoin while I'm selling it and no one would be wise to my tricks.
OCR users don't really. Its a lot of friction.
There's a reason why cryptocoins were so good at scamming. They were fluid enough that you could be a dishonest snake. But if you write like a 10,000 line codebase using tesseract-ocr, you ain't switching off of that without some serious amounts of effort. (Certainly not a week's worth of effort IMO).