Sure ChatGPT and other LLMs can do all sorts of stuff. It can give you inspiration, help you search through a corpus that hasn't been scraped properly, or just fill in the blanks for laborious writing that was generally a waste of your time. It's lots of fun to play around with. But is that worth enough to offset the R&D, training, compute, and profit costs associated? Are people willing to pay for LLMs at a scale that makes sense? For companies that really need this kind of writing done, is it that much cheaper than hiring an English literature major intern? Can the sorts of "hallucinations" an LLM outputs be tolerated in actual applications?
The two fields suffer from a similar problem. Sure they're breakthroughs, but are they enough to derive broad utility? Regardless I disagree with the premise of Doctorow's post. I think the problem is subtle and not deserving of the silly snark that his post contains as it tried to pick apart banal definitions.
All in all, I think it's the most useful technology in the last decade. If you live in a bubble you won't realize that, but it's what it is.