They are doing more than links, but I'd compare it to a race where you do 500 miles by car and the last 5 miles are on foot. Only when the cars are very similar

They are doing more than links, but I'd compare it to a race where you do 500 miles by car and the last 5 miles are on foot. Only when the cars are very similar in speed does the "on foot" result matter. It's why everyone in SEO is buying themselves into whitelabels on large, well-linked sites. You're right that AI-generated wouldn't matter if the AI-text was of high quality. So far, Google says that AI-generated is against the guidelines (read: you can/will be penalized if you do, like you might be for cloaking). Maybe they'll change their stance if AI provides high quality texts. But if it can, will anyone still need Google, or will they go to the AI directly? And again, to judge the quality, Google would probably need to be able to generate the result themselves, in which case they'd have the trustable AI.