I was in the same boat as you - one of the earliest to get on Copilot (bing chat at the time) and ChatGPT, and I also played a lot with craiyon/dalle mini. I thought it was fun, and even regrettably used it for roleplay. I started to become skeptical around 2024 as well but I found it really difficult to stop using it. I was quite heavily addicted in a way, and it was really difficult to stop myself. It also completely wrecked my ability to independently think and be creative.

Now that I'm out of it, I am pretty strongly anti-genAI, and I see such little use for it. I've always enjoyed art and have been taking a lot of time lately to improve mine, and I am doing it for personal enjoyment but I also notice that I'm finding it particularly hard to be seen online or get commissions, and I think the saturation of AI is partially related to that. I also see it doing more in IT spaces, which is particularly scary as that was my strongest subject and what I want to go into as a career.

My mother has even started offloading parenting to it, asking it "how to deal with [me]" which really hurts, and I see more and more people just getting consumed by AI psychosis.

I really hope the situation with AI can change for the better soon somehow, it can't be sustained like this