What would be the most important skill in the era of generative AI?

The way I see it generative text AI are good for creating first drafts of any text you need to create and as a brainstorming tool. The biggest drawback is that you can get some very random results that most people will interpret as lies. My current view is that won't change any time soon or ever. What I see happening is that most companies providing the service will work towards making sure that good information is provided by proofing the most popular queries but they will not be able to cover all queries or prompts. So, the more information you know related to your field, the easier it will be to spot falsehoods. Experts in their field will greatly increase their output by using the AI. Novices will have a hard time since they will never be sure about the information given by the AI so they will need to proof it somehow or risk using bad info. which will reflect badly on their output.

AI products are beginning to look like most of the tech products in terms of their reliability. You need to be a bit of an expert to make sure it's all working. There's really no tech product that will work 100 percent of the time. It's rare that a user can pick up a product without having to learn a bit about how it should work and how it can fail to work. AI's will have the same drawbacks so knowing about how to get the best out of the AI will be a strong skill. Similar to the way IT needs all the people to function. AI tech support will be a thing.

Generative AI has changed our life for good

No, it hasn't. I still acquire knowledge, work, and get answers pretty much the same way I did 10 years ago.

What would be the essential skill for us in your opinion to make the best of AI?

The same skills that are required to take advantage of any new technology: understand what problems are there, see if the technology can solve them, if yes, build a solution, sell it.

Tuning out hype and working on meaningful stuff

Currently with the hallucination problems, AI is not good at the things people want, which is trusted information. However, it is good at the things people don't want, easy to use to make fake scams, deceitful info etc. Somewhat a decent tool for promotional blurbs and advertising. That kind of falls into the deceitful category anyway :-P

Not sure what the image generators are good for beyond social media clout. They are over saturating the supply of certain styles of images. Handy for grabbing an image for your blog post, but a bit lacking for professional work as you can't create something to an exact specification.

I haven’t really changed the way I search information or acquire knowledge.

The only difference is that I can make very cool artworks while being devoid of any artistic skills

Teaching!

You learn to teach your bot to understand you.

Content is still king. Learn to use it to create content.

In a world where glorified autocomplete is mistaken for sentience by gullible yoyos, the most useful skill is a well-honed bullshit detector.

For a first calibration, ensure that your detector goes absolutely apeshit at the first sentence of OP's question.