In the last month I personally used (as in, it was useful) AI for this:
- LLM-powered transcription and translation made it so I could have a long conversation with my airport driver in Vietnam.
- Helped me turn 5-10x ideas into working code and usable tools as I used to.
- Nano Banana restored dozens of cherished family photos for a Christmas gift for my parents.
- Help me correctly fix a ton of nuanced aria/accessibility issues in a production app.
- Taught/explained a million things to me: difference between an aneurysm/stroke, why the rise of DX12/Vulkan gaming engines killed off nVidia SLI, political/economic/social parallels between 1920s and 2020s, etc...
Maybe everyone isn't using it yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. Way too many people find real use every day in a lot of AI products. Just because MS Office Copilot sucks (and it does), doesn't mean it is all useless.
I think you're exaggerating a little, but aren't entirely wrong. The Internet has completely changed daily life for most of humanity. AI can mean a lot of things, but a lot of it is blown way out of proportion. I find LLMs useful to help me rephrase a sentence or explain some kind of topic, but it pales in comparison to email and web browsers, YouTube, and things like blogs.
