Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, LLMs are "simply" pseudo-semantic search engines; if you know what you're looking for, they work pretty well for fulfilling "satisfiable" searches, that is, those aimed at content produced by some other human scattered across the infosphere.

The generation of code and images fits right into this; the famous, historical "astronaut on a horse" is, in substance, a collage of images, images produced by other humans and "assembled".

On a broader scale, this means that humanity will more or less be able to count on Conrad Gessner's Universal Library/Biblioteca Universalis/Library of Babel, and generally speaking, we can aim for a future where humans produce knowledge and machines put it into practice. Like any evolution, this will lead to some losses while gaining something else.

The current explosion is mostly hype and a nazi-managerial wet dream; as for universities, the reality is that they are largely obsolete, so it's only natural that students, rather than seeking knowledge, which is of little use to them as it's disconnected from the present, are just looking for a piece of paper to build a career otherwise.