Right now the generators aren’t effective but they are definitely stepping stones to something better in the future.
If that future thing produces video, movies and pictures better than anything humanity can produce at a rate faster than we can produce things… how is that a waste?
It can arguably be bad for society but definitely not a waste.
Most of it is used to fool people for engagement, scam, politics or propaganda, it definitely is a huge waste of resource, time, brain and compute power. You have to be completely brainwashed by consumerism and techsolutionism to not see it