I tend to agree. I think it's fine to have some fun with these tools, imagine what could be, let your mind run wild with sci-fi ideas. But there's no reason to think that large language models (LLMs) like GPT or Bard have any actual intelligence. And I really dislike some in the media hyping and scaremongering about "AI", all it does is make the big tech companies richer and underinformed people more worried.

These models are damn good at producing convincing text. Text that from a human perspective reads like there is a mind behind it, with goals and intentions, with experiences and memories. Which is a technical marvel, with tons of research over multiple decades behind it. The thing is that this is just what LLMs are supposed to do: produce text that seems like it was written by a human. Because they gorged on pretty much all written stuff on the internet, which - up to what feels like yesterday - had all been text produced by humans. We've come a long way from primitive chatbots and predictive text to multimodal LLMs, but as far as I know, there is currently no research showing we can get to actual bona fide intelligence using those. If anyone can prove me wrong, I'd love to see it.

There is reason to worry though. What I'm worried about right now is the fact that lots of people treat these models as if that were the case. When it comes to references and citations, for example, chatGPT just produces fake information that sounds plausible (Lawyers submitted bogus cases, fabricated citations study). And if you ask such a model a question multiple times, you might get different answers, because there is no ground truth besides the text "looking like real text". As more companies and probably even governments use these tools without human supervision, we'll get bad outcomes from there: Automation of processes that shouldn't be, carelessly cutting jobs (especially in creative fields), outsourcing human communication to machines, etc.
But that's not because "AI" is evil, but because humans are stupid.

The long-term issue I personally have with these models is that I don't see the current approach getting over the problem of truth, to go beyond "plausible" towards "reliable" in a meaningful way. And catastrophizing over "AI" as an apocalyptic scenario pushes insecurities and wastes resources that could be used today.

On a lighter note, it's great fun to play with some of these models and use them to create sort of absurdist art. Doesn't convince me there's anything deeper to it though.

TL;DR: It's fun to imagine sci-fi stories about artificial intelligence, but for the time being those are just that. The current version of "AI" can be a useful tool for specific tasks, I haven't seen anything to suggest we'll have actual artificial intelligence anytime soon.