Yes, state of the art models like midjourney, sd3 are _really_ good. You are bounded only by your imagination.

The idea that generative AI is only derivative was never an empirical claim, its always been a cope.

Because you focus on how they are similar and not how they are different, to me it is extremely obvious they are very different. Students make mistakes and learn and then stop doing them soon after, when I taught students at college I saw that over and over. LLM however still does the same weird mistakes they did 4 years ago, they just hide it a bit better today, the core different in how they act compared to humans is still the same as in GPT-2 to me, because they are still completely unable to learn or understand their mistakes like almost every human can.

Without being able to understand your own mistakes you can never reach human intelligence, and I think that is a core limitation of current LLM architecture.

Edit: Note that many/most jobs doesn't require full human general intelligence. We used to have human calculators etc, same will happen in the future, but we will continue to use humans as long as we don't have generally intelligent computers that can understand their mistakes.