Indeed. I never understood, let alone bought into, the NFT hype, but I think VR is a good reference point for AI:

There was a real, genuine product in the Oculus Rift. It did something that was an incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.

The Metaverse was laughable, and VR got glued to a lot of things where it added zero value, or worse negative value, for example my attempts to watch pre-recorded 3D video gave me nausea because the camera can only rotate, not displace, with my head movements.

Compare and contrast with AI:

LLMs and Diffusion models are also real, genuine products, that are incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.

A lot of the attempts to integrate these AI have been laughable, and have added zero-to-negative value.