>scraping all kinds of copyrighted materials and then profiting off the models while the people doing all the labor are getting either nothing (for content generation)

Yeah, but these people won't be doing that labor anymore. Now that text-to-image models have learned how to draw, they don't need a constant stream of artists feeding them new art.

Now artists can now work at a higher level, creating ideas that they can render into images using the AI as a tool. They'll be able to create much larger and more complex projects, like a solo indie artist creating an entire anime.

>LLMs... barely have any legitimate use-cases

Well, one big use case: they make image generators possible. Those rely on embeddings from language models, which are a sort of neural representation of the ideas behind the text. It grants the other network the ability to work with plain english.

Right now embeddings are mostly used to guide generation (across many fields, not just images) and semantic search. But they are useful for communicating with a neural network performing any task, and my guess is that the long-term impact of LLMs will be that computers will understand plain english now.