I'm building an addition to my house and I use AI to visualize parts of it, which helps me plan efficiently, and I use it to answer questions about skills that I only have a little bit of experience in. I'm saving a ton of money and developing skills, so I count that as benefiting "the average Joe." I admit that I'm a programmer, but I'm using this as an example because it's helping me in an area in which I have little expertise, which applies to everyone.

People used to do this with books. Multiple generations of people before me built their own houses, when they had a question they'd just ask another human who had actual experience.

I'm not denying that AI makes searching for some of this easier, or might help you figure out what the right questions to ask are, but I often feel like it's a mostly crappy solution to the fact that we scaled data to infinity and refused to pay for any level of curation.