This isn't a ceiling, though. This is the new floor: What you can get with more or less zero human effort and ~$100.
I expect we're going to see more and more amazing "hobby projects" that did involve both a few hundred dollars in tokens and hours of human creativity and effort in combination.
I get your point, and I think it's broadly true. But I'm not building things with AI to impress others, and it could be that GP or OP are doing the same.
Unasked-for-story-time: In the early aughts, there was a PC video game called Star Trek: Elite Force. It was a FPS genre game and included a feature called "Virtual Voyager" that at the time was revolutionary because it would let you just freely explore a subset of the Starship Voyager without any linear mission requirements, the closest any Trek fans could get to gaining access to the real Paramount Studios Stage 9-and-friends sets where the TV show was filmed, which for Trekkies with no life is quite the big deal.
Wasting the GPT-6 Astra capabilities over a single month of the $200 plan, I've built out multiple decks of an Excelsior-class starship based on a deck plan of my design, dealing with creative decisions on how to adapt the limited Star Trek canon knowledge about the interior deck sizes and materials aboard an Excelsior-class vessel, and at the end of this project, all I will have will be a graphically crappy but 3d explorable virtual starship I can walk around, look at the interior of, and mentally place my daydreamed Star Trek personal fanfic that I used to pencil in a notebook, and now I direct/dictate/produce using agents to write their crappy sloppy prose, but is tuned exactly to my preferences, and now will be able to have specific camera angles and relative details because I can screenshot the 3d ship explorer I made with the crappy AI.
I've got the pencil, I've got the nerd no social life time for creative projects, and I am still writing the no-AI no-name fantasy novel that nobody will read except my family and AI-data-gorgers, but neither of the two projects above, which have provided me hours of entertainment dopamine, would have happened without AI tooling making it easy enough to be creative without having to hand render every little detail.
Art is produced for arts own sake, right? That's the phrase? Well this vibe slop story and this vibe slop 3d viewer are digital goods / digital art to _me_, because I like them for their own sake. I can't copyright any of it, its all been infected by AI stuff. I can't get a job with it, I can barely orbit in Blender and don't find it worth the time to learn to render drawing in 2d and sculpting in 3d (I've tried both over the years in pre and post AI eras, I'm from a creative family whether I wish it or not), the costs to render skills manually make it not worth my time to do.
But AI makes it worth my time because it is an enzyme that reduces the input cost of me prototyping my creative desire out without having to laboriously create every last everything.
That makes sense. The difference would be if you were to put it out there as proof of your ability rather than as proof of your imagination. Now I'd like to see what you made :)
I expect we're going to see more and more amazing "hobby projects" that did involve both a few hundred dollars in tokens and hours of human creativity and effort in combination.