That is the central question. Why is it that people are prepared to believe in all the wild fantasies that the marketing arms of the tech industry come up with? Shouldn't the expectation be that the majority would instead be more cautious and avoid believing all the overblown promises, especially when they repeatedly fail to be fulfilled?
It's so easy to have an opinion about AI, the fundamental ideas are so prevalent in day-to-day discourse, and it's so hard to prove any given opinion wrong.
One very good argument I've read recently is that most of what pro-science people label as "anti-scientific" statements like anti-vax stuff are made by people that don't refuse science as a whole but just science coming from what they perceive is a corrupted establishment. Clearly this involve cherry-picking that validates their ideological positions, or it's just following the twisted narrative of some political group.
Science, with the capital S, is still society's reference framework for truth (and this is a huge problem, but not the one we are talking about) but these people refute the priests and the religion, not the God. New priests are bending the same God to their interests and the times favor them over the previous priests.
Because very influential people have thrown their weight into the discussion I would say. You have Kurzweil who basically predicts that the singularity is imminent every five years, and you had Musk and Hawking painting apocalyptic scenarios about AI. That dominated the AI pop news headlines for weeks if not months.
On the other hand people like Andrew Ng or Kai-Fu Lee who actually work in the industry and draw attention to the socio-economic impact of AI, which is very real, seem to only find an audience within the community itself, if at all.
The reason is probably twofold. Terminator-esque stories are more interesting than talking about the economic impact of AI, and the industry has a lot more to gain by distracting people with grandiose scenarios than by talking about the negative impact they have on the lives of working people and society at large.
Kurzweil has always predicted the singularity for 2045. He may be wrong but I don't find that prediction or Musk and Hawking say AI may be dangerous as wild fantasies. You can make reasoned arguments for all that stuff.