ML has been used for eg. medical reasons years before ChatGPT dropped. It's only called "AI" now because that sounds fancier. Consumer ML ("AI") is useless for anything professional - generating a 10 paragraph text filled with emojis and em dashes, and even more factual errors won't solve anything. Continuation of training ML models to eg. detect virus DNA similarities, simulate vaccines, create realistic simulations of weather, climate, vulcans etc., which - again - has been done since more than a decade or so, is actively being done. It's just that it's not as simple as feeding a few million Reddit and Facebook posts into the learning process to get factually correct results in a useful format.

Future alien archaeologists studying our ancient cities and remains of our civilization .... "I wonder what caused them to all die out so suddenly?"

How they got it to give them all 5 toes.

Have you taken a closer look?

Maybe I will