Ask HN: How real is the AI thing?

I am noticing lots of blogposts and tweet threads saying that ChatGPT and other AI-related tools are some sort of massive revolution that will change substantially our world (or at least our society).<p>This sort of content is also implicating either implicitly or explicitly that if you don’t jump on that wagon (even as a user) you will miss out on great opportunities and basically be left out.<p>Lately there have been lots of breakthroughs in AI and there seems to be a booming interest in all of this hype, probably higher than ever.<p>Personally I am not that over-excited seeing ChatGPT interacting with almost every kind of topic, perhaps because I know these tools are built and polished by actual human beings and it is still error-prone and breakable. Not diminishing in any way the efforts from the creators, mind you.<p>If anything, these AI hype could be a signal of human dawn fall: once students start using these tools to write their essays, writers start publishing AI-generated books and getting paid for that, or scientists start publishing papers produced mostly by AIs, such tools will be the new normal and we may get dumber and dumber as a species because AI will do mostly everything for us. This is the most controversial point for me.<p>Is this AI boom for real? How much of a revolution is it?