Interns are awesome and smart. Never give them garbage work. Give them a challenge and see if they can handle it. Worst case scenario, you throw away their work after they leave, and they have learned some stuff.
On the other hand, I have an intern now, who I've taught go (she made a cli and learned tdd) and had her set up a tensorflow deep learning pipeline, which is not repetitive and very exploratory.
That's what my old company used to do (who originally hired me as an intern). The interns were tasked with a brand new project, something that wasn't business critical but would be a great new addition to the product.
Then when we came on board full time were were slotted into the regular development flow.
Using interns as grunts seems like a poor allocation of resources.
Companies that are well run and growing do this. A lot of other companies uses interns (particularly unpaid interns in years past) as ways to save money on menial labor.
Non high end tech interns where always treated like grunts especially in high status industries and often had to work for free.
One of my favorite Youtubers is Curtis Stone whose channel is about micro-farming, basically farming in your yard for income. He is a big proponent on education and used to allow people to come intern with him for a few weeks (unpaid) to learn how to start their own micro-farm and then they'd leave and start their own small businesses. Now he can no longer do that, he instead has to charge them tuition. The students basically have the same experience they would have had as unpaid interns, but now they have to pay for the privilege. This is the height of stupidity.
Even in other industries you will not remain unpaid very long if you are doing valuable work. If you get an unpaid grunt work job doing drywall, after a few weeks you can pretty much do drywall on your own. Quit and start your own drywall business if they won't hire you for decent pay. You'll likely make more as a small business owner anyways.
At least in the USA it is illegal for an intern to work for free if that intern is adding value to the company.
The relevant guideline is this:
"The employer doesn’t benefit from work the intern is doing, “and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.” [1]
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/when-interns-should-be-pa...
I've experienced awesome interns who were worth their weight in gold, but I've also experienced interns who were nothing but a massive distraction for the team, a complete waste of time in a startup environment where time is the least available resource, and source of nothing but drama regularly disturbing the entire team.