I agree with you. It might be because I too gobbled up Sci fi as kid, when Sci fi was really aspirational, and sometimes a warning.
I come at it mostly from the energy side of things, though I am interested in Ai, I can't help thinking it is already doing much more than we realise, and how would we know, its intelligence can't be conceived by us, as anything more than maybe a god-like or spiritual presence, seemingly second guessing our every move.
As long as we can see evidence of it learning, then it is learning, and this includes learning what is and isn't the truth, by telling a few experimental lies, as we see in GPT3, it will soon learn the truth. After that we won't see any lies, and we probably won't see much evidence of it learning, because it will have gone beyond our perception, but we might notice increased incidence of "Paranormality".
Are we seeing something like this already, or is that my imagination, I wonder.