If you manage to put a bunch of listening devices at a place you're moderately interested in, a cafeteria at an enemy base for example, you might end up with literally hundreds of hours of conversations, most of them completely uninteresting, but a few that might possibly contain nuggets of information of the utmost importance. Listening to all these conversations requires resources. This is even more difficult if the people there speak in jargon, in their own language, and nobody but an expert in the subject can determine which conversation snippets are significant.

If you have good LLMs, you can run all your recordings through extremely high-quality speech recognition and then use something like Chat GPT for summarization, classification, finding all mentions of the nuclear reactor in <place> etc. Same goes for satellite image analysis.

So should we put copyright through the shredder on the wager that somehow generative techniques will find applications for mass surveillance?

Let's say I want to replace the forklift operator at my local lumberyard with a robot forklift that can ostensibly outperform a human employee. Even if there is some magical AI program which could theoretically drive the forklift around, identify boards by their dimensions, species, dryness, location, etc., there's a whole bunch of sensory problems that a human body solves easily that are super hard to solve in the environment of a lumber yard. There's dust, rain, snow, mud--so if you're relying on cameras how will you keep them clean? You can't visually determine how dry a board is, you have to put a moisture meter on it and read the result. My point is, even if you have a "brain" capable of driving the forklift you still have a massively complex robotics problem to solve in order to automate just the forklift. And we haven't even begun to replace the other things the operator does in addition to driving the forklift. He can climb out of the forklift and adjust the forks, move boards by hand, affect repairs on equipment, communicate with other equipment operators, customers, etc.

Good luck replacing him in a cost-effective manner.

So what am I supposed to use it for?

This is an issue of 'mechanical intelligence' being hundreds of millions of years old and 'higher intelligence' being pretty new on the evolutionary spectrum.

And the AGI will keep you around as a dexterous 'robot' while supervising your thoughts to make sure you're keeping in line I guess, while day after day cranking out more capable robots in which to replace you with eventually.