It's not new, but it's more usable, which makes new transactions and productions possible by lowering information costs.
That lower of costs is the ONLY basis for thinking AI is good for all. It's to the detriment of people previously managing the complexity manually through training and experience, but in favor of their customers who couldn't previously afford them.
They are really helpful to answer concrete questions, basically a replacement of manual web search and filtering, getting just exactly answers I was looking for. For example, one of my dialogue with chatgpt 4o was about boosting plant growth in a fish tank - you certainly can find a lot of web sites about it, but I simply described my aquatic environment and asked for a recipe - and the answers sound and well supported, a post dialogue double check of the sources help
That's the crucial point, though, you wouldn't have trusted it without checking the source after all. My experience with 4o is that 4 out of 5 answers I check are wildly incorrect or entirely made up, while with the rest, if I copy my prompt 1:1 into Google, I get the same correct answer pretty much verbatim in result #1. So I don't understand how so many people still see this as anything else but a waste of time, an intermediary step before going to an actual, credible source -- a step which in the best case is entirely unnecessary, in the worst case dangerously misleading. (From my non-representative survey among friends, the answer may be that barely anyone checks the validity of answers, and are simply unaware that they rely on answers from a system which, except for some lucky cases, gives them wrong ones.
That lower of costs is the ONLY basis for thinking AI is good for all. It's to the detriment of people previously managing the complexity manually through training and experience, but in favor of their customers who couldn't previously afford them.