solarpunk memes

I agree with most of what you said, except this:

And at some point even the loudest haters will look back and go, wow, how’d we ever do stuff without this?

The haters are not going to do that, because the AI's capability is generally not the thing that people are hating on.

Here are some of the things people dislike about AI generated content:

• It is trained with the work of people, without compensation or consent. Essentially this means it is stealing other people's work for and using it to increase the profits of big corporations.
• It is used as an excuse for further data harvesting. ("To use our amazing AI services, you need to send your data to our servers for processing...")
• It has massive computational cost, which means large environmental costs. The cost is largely hidden, because the computation are done somewhere else.
• It devalues human effort. Since the AI can generate some fairly good output very easily, it discourages people from learning basic skills. i.e. instead of trying to draw or create something themselves, and thus improving a person's own skill, its fair faster and easier to make the AI do it. In the short term this doesn't matter, but in the long term it may result in deskilling the very people who the AI is meant to be learning from.
• Since it is very easy to create, there is a flood of AI created content now on the internet. This huge amount of added content means it is now harder to find non-AI content than it use to be.
• There are obvious problems with impersonation, spam, scams, etc. being made faster and easier with AI.
• ...

You get the idea. My point is that "it's not useful" isn't really one of the main complaints. Rather, people hope that it isn't useful, because they don't want it to become too entrenched.