I think it’s a fun toy that is being misused and forced into a lot of things it isn’t ready for.
I’m doing a lot with AI but it’s pretty much slop. I use self hosted stable diffusion, Ollama, and whisper for a discord bot, code help, writing assistance, and I pay elevenlabs for TTS so I can talk to it. It’s been pretty useful. It’s all running on an old computer with a 3060. Voice chat is a little slow and has its own problems but it’s all been fun to learn.
They sell for more now than they did new. Average around $200 on eBay.