These innovations aren't really pointless though? They may not be relevant to your interests, but they have practical applications and Stable Diffusion especially is already seeing a lot of interest from artists and people who need art but don't need something 'custom' enough to pay for a human. In both cases they are saving lots of 'basic' work that might have either been done by a human before or not done at all.

Plus, these are the things we hear about because they look flashy. There is plenty of work behind the scenes on applying these innovations to more 'practical' matters like automation.