I am kind of in the same boat as you. I sit in a weird spot of thinking the current trend of AI is really impressive, but also thinking people are massively over-hyping it (with a smaller counter wave of some people really undermining it).

Having tangled with natural language processing and transformation in the past (always with dismal results), I can say it's one of the most annoying problems to tackle in computation, because natural languages have the horrible tentency of being very irregular (i.e.: they are a fucking mess).

ChatGPT capabilities to parse and generate fluent language never ceases to amaze me.

At the same time I don't think it's going to take over the world. It's more like a game-changer productivity tool (with all the upheaval that comes along when those appear) than the birth of Skynet.