I just listened to the bitcoin.review podcast and now I'm not so sure it's a scam. Don't get me wrong, jpegs are not scarce, but the ordinals are more interesting than I originally thought.
Discussion
Why would you spend a lot of bitcoin to buy one picture that was created within couple of hours?!
I would not do that, but it seems the ordinal creator wants eth heads to assimilate into bitcoin culture. That's what he said anyway.