>Never awful (anymore), never fantastic

Don't know about that, I always found average awful in itself, even in human output (like most pop), and even more so in AI output.

Something actually awful can be better than average - more entertaining and more felt. I'd rather watch The Room than an average movie.

That is definitely the essence of AI: It is the average of all the inputs it has been trained on.

Frank Zappa was once asked about guitar virtuosos like John McLaughlin and his answer was somemthing like "You can maybe plays solo faster than anybody, but can your playing surprise me?".