Being a fad is relative. Something that's hugely popular and being brought up in every industry as a world changing technology for a while before normalizing as something useful in a few areas but not a good fit in many others qualifies as a fad in my book. Most tech fads never go totally away because they're not useless, they were just overblown.

Generative ML models certainly are useful and extend what we think of ML traditionally being capable of doing. But the current worldwide AI madness is not due to the merits of Gen ML, it's because it's marketed as AI (which to 90 percent of the population means what AGI means to nerds) and makes people think "we're about to be in terminator any second now" when in reality it means "hey my autocomplete isn't totally crap anymore"