if it was actually AI, instead of a stochastic parrot, we could ask it to design robots that could do the manual labor that we still have to do, because we haven't been able to design robots to do the manual labor.

Unfortunately, LLMs aren't intelligent in any way, so you cannot ask them to synthesize any kind of second-order knowledge.

This is why they won't take away the creative work, either. They are fundamentally incapable of creating anything new.