I find it to be the exact opposite. The idea of "Artificial Intelligence" as a thinking machine is fascinating. However, now that i learned a certain amount about this current neural network paradigm, the marketing magic of it as an intelligent system is gone, it is no longer interesting to me. These models are just some dry big-data statistical machinery to me.
I think many people find it interesting precisely because they dont understand it and think there is some magic in there. Of course when hype is stupid and people think the singularity is coming then it sounds a lot more interesting