I think you underestimate the willingness of the average American to consume slop. It really doesn't take much for an LLM to produce something good enough that millions of people would lie on their couch and zombify to it (while consuming ads). If AI were as crappy as you say, it wouldn't have been mentioned in the terms to end the recent writer's strike in Hollywood.

Nothing matters except the outcome. Let's say, hypothetically, that we invent something much closer to so-called "AGI" – I can guarantee you that many pundits and HN users will find reasons to believe it's not real and that it's crap or whatever. Why should anyone care? Plenty of people thought the Web was crap in the beginning, and now look at where we are. I don't see any reason to believe AI won't have some impact on jobs and the economy for the next decade. If it was total crap, no one would be using it, but all I know is tons of developers are using Copilot, and I'm using GPT-4 every single day. Are we all just spinning tops or is it actually being of some use to us?