It’s very much not beside the point. Productivity is measured in how much value you get out from the hours your workers put in.

But that only gets you to a philosophical argument about what "value" is. Many would argue that being able to get your thing into a Super Bowl commercial is extremely valuable. I definitely have never built anything that did.

It's very much imperfect, but the only consistently agreed upon and useful definition of "value" we have in the West is monetary value, and in that sense, we have at least a few major examples of AI generating value rapidly.