Technology

I also notice the ONLY people who can offer firsthand reports how it's actually useful in any way are in a very, very narrow niche.

Basically, if you're not a programmer, and even then a very select set of programmers, then your life is completely unimpacted by generative AI broadly. (Not counting the millions of students who used it to write papers for them.)

AI is currently one of those solutions in search of a problem. In its current state, it can't really do anything useful broadly. It can make your written work sound more professional and at the same time, more mediocre. It can generate very convincing pictures if you invest enough time into trying to decode the best sequence of prompts and literally just get lucky, but it's far too inacurate and inconsistent to generate say, a fully illustrated comic book or cartoon, unless you already have a lot of talent in that field. I have tried many times to use AI in my current job to analyze PDF documents and spreadsheets and it's still completely unable to do work that requires mathematics as well as contextual understanding of what that math represents.

You can have really fun or cool conversations with it, but it's not exactly captivating. It is also wildly inaccurate for daily use. I ask it for help finding songs by describing the lyrics and other clues, and it confidentially points me to non-existing albums by hallucinated artists.

I have no doubt in time it's going to radically change our world, but that time frame is going to require a LOT more time and baking before it's done. Despite how excited a few select people are, nothing is changing overnight. We're going to have a century-long "singularity" and won't realize we've been through it until it's done. As history tends to go.