If you think that “pretty much everything AI is a scam”, then you’re either setting your expectations way too high, or you’re only looking at startups trying to get the attention of investors.
There are plenty of AI models out there today that are open source and can be used for a number of purposes: Generating images (stable diffusion), transcribing audio (whisper), audio generation, object detection, upscaling, downscaling, etc.
Part of the problem might be with how you define AI… It’s way more broad of a term than what I think you’re trying to convey.