I’ll give my take.
Yes, AI is a tool, just like a hammer or screwdriver. Its role is to take data processing tasks and do them faster than us.
In short, no. Once you get over the “wow, this new technology is so cool and human-like” bump that we all hit, you realize that everything AI says, writes, or generates an image of, has already been done before and is oftentimes cliche or even repetitive. It trains on human data, and anything it could possibly output has already been seen in this training data. Not verbatim of course - it isn’t a database - but it still stands that its only source of knowledge is the training data. LLMs are token predictors and can’t truly do anything creative.
I don’t want a relationship with AI. I want it to classify my list of 30,000 words into one of several categories. And it did.
I know that’s not the popular perspective here, but mistaking a token predictor for a being with its own original thoughts is like interpreting a snake’s hiss as a sign of affection.