It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.
Dell reveals people don't care about AI in PCs (https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows-laptops/dell-rev...)
I think it's because there's a financial motivation for all the toxic positivity that can be seen all over the internet. A lot of people put large quantities of money into AI-related stocks and to them any criticism is a direct attack on their wealth. It's no different from crypobros who put their kids' entire college fund into some failed and useless project and now they need that project to succeed or else it's all over.
My guess is that it’s more of a recency bias sort of thing: it’s quite easy to assume that a newer way of solving a problem is superior to existing ways simply because it’s new. And also, of course, newfangled things naturally attract investment capital because everyone implicitly knows it’s hard to sell someone a thing they already have and don’t need more of.
It’s not just tech. For example, many people in the USA believe that the ease of getting new drugs approved by the FDA is a reason why the US’s health care system is superior to others, and want to make it even easier to get drugs approved. But research indicates the opposite: within a drug class, newer drugs tend to be less effective and have worse side effects than older ones. But new drugs are definitely much more expensive because their period of government-granted monopoly hasn’t expired yet. And so, contrary to what recency bias leads us to believe, this more conservative approach to drug approval is actually one of the reasons why other countries have better health care outcomes at lower cost.
I would guess it’s more just consumer fatigue. For two reasons. First, AI’s still at the “all bark and no bite” phase of the hype cycle, and most people don’t enjoy trying a bunch of things just to figure out if they work as advertised. Where early adopters think of that as play time, typical consumers see it as wasted time. Second, and perhaps even worse, they have learned that they can’t trust that à product will still be doing that useful thing in the future because the tech enthusiasts who make these products can’t resist the urge to keep fucking with it.