It's just that the day to day instances of "AI" that you might run into are nowhere near the level of hype they initially got. For instance all kinds of voice assistants are just DUMB. Like, so so bad they actively put people off using them, with countless examples of them failing at even the most basic queries. And the instances where they feel smart it looks like it's only because you actually hit a magic passphrase that someone hardcoded in.
My point is - if you don't actually work with state of the art AI research, then yeah, it's easy to see it as nothing more than overhyped garbage, because that's exactly what's being sold to regular consumers.