Perhaps the reason why ChatGPT has become so popular is because it provides entertainment. So it is not a great leap forward in AI or a path to AGI, but instead a incredibly convoluted way of keeping reasonable intelligent people occupied and amused. You enter a prompt, and it returns a result - what a fun game!
Maybe that is it's primary contribution to society.
1. Drafting directional copy I can give to a real copywriter to create something we'd all be happy presenting to users.
2. Act as a sounding board for peer-personnel issues I'm dealing with at work.
3. "Dumb down" concepts in academic journals/articles such that I can make sense of them.
4. Just today it helped me build an app to drill a specific set of chord shapes/inversions on the guitar that I've been struggling with (programming has always been a very casual hobby and, consequently, I'm not very good at it).