Do you still find HTML5 to be as interesting as ever, or do you find that interest wanes with time? AI is many decades older than HTML5, so if your interest does wane then it stands to reason that there would be very little vestigial interest remaining.
I find WebGPU interesting as an extension of HTML5; I think HTML5 offers features that are not being taken advantage of by mainstream websites. I think HTML5 is interesting because, as a software engineer, it's a set of tools I can build something with. LLMs are not interesting to me because they're simply a product to use or consume. They're not terribly interesting to interface with because the commercial ones simply sit behind an HTTP API, so the only thing to do with them is send them different prompts, which is, again, uninteresting.
I'm with you but to say text/image generation isn't interesting is just wrong. It is VERY interesting but selling it as "AI" is just wrong.
"interesting" is in the eye of the beholder. I simply don't find text generation that interesting, especially as a software engineer, and I REALLY don't find image generation interesting at all.
As a software engineer, you don’t have to.
But Hollywood does. Lots of producer/PA/VFX work is being rapidly automated and the genie is not going back inside the bottle.