It sure is useful at making my boss post a lot of conflicting things because AI can’t understand context at all. “Force multiplier” doesn’t mean it’s multiplying good things. It can just as easily multiply nonsense.

1. The cost of operating these machine learning systems is too high, and the benefit too low:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemmagreen/2026/07/02/ai-costs-more-than-the-people-it-replaced/

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/ai-costs-spiral-as-firms-lose-spending-control/articleshow/131397973.cms

https://cybernews.com/ai-news/ai-token-human-salaries-automation-spending-tech-execs/

2. The most productive thing the current generation of machine learning systems has done is fill the Internet with garbage:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/1971683/ai-is-filling-up-the-internet-with-garbage-spam-sites.html

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/over-50-percent-internet-ai-slop

https://mashable.com/article/ai-generated-internet-era-already-here

3. LLMs are real, AI is fake.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake

The current trends in software development are being driven primarily by the interests of venture capitalists who are trying to escape the debts they acquired buying into Web 3.0 (remember Web 3.0?), the Metaverse/VR, and cryptocurrency. They're looking for the next big get-rich-quick option, and manipulating the market to try and force it to happen. The people making decisions about which projects get funded literally do not care if the end product is useful or destructive or whatever, as long as it looks convincing enough to get other people to buy it. This is why there's been so much recent hype about "AI" "escaping" its test environments and hacking other companies &etc. It makes the product sound more capable than it is in reality. It's also why the Trump administration is all-in on "AI" development and actively threatening people who object - because Trump loves a good scam that he can make money off of, and he loves to respond with violence or threats of violence when people get in his way.

The current generation of machine learning models requires vast amounts of input data to achieve useful outcomes. The entire content of the public Internet has already been scraped and ingested. There is no more training data to feed in. The current systems will gain marginal improvements in efficiency and in focusing the models to perform better at certain tasks, but that will be it. They will not magically become capable of learning new tasks for which there is not millions of data points for training. The training is done, refining is in progress, but there will not be any major leaps in capability. There certainly won't be a general artificial intelligence.

Maybe the next generation of machine learning will produce software that can teach itself without an Internet's worth of input data. That will happen after the current market implodes, and another generation or two of research and development is completed.

Perhaps there is some value in the current generation as you say. Whatever the benefit of it might be, the cost is far too high. It is not and never will be worth the damage being done to the Internet, the economy, human society, and the environment we all live in.

And I haven't even gotten into generative models being used to create child exploitation material, run massive scam operations, produce massive amounts of propaganda, or enable the authoritarian surveillance state. This stuff is trash, the people in charge of the development are trash, the people peddling it are trash, the people funding it are trash, and the people that support it are trash.

Get correct.

"Its useless and acheives nothing" is not a realistic take and anybody who does any kind of office job and has used an ai in the past year would be able to tell you the same.

I have an office job and I can tell you it’s useless.

Sure you might feel like your being more productive but that’s only because your lowering your output quality.

Reducing cost by reducing quality has always existed.

Think about it this way, if you reach support helpline, would you feel like your getting the same quality support if it’s a chatbot?

Possibly, but there's no practical use for it in my industry, and everything I've seen it try and do has been, at best, mediocre. I've also noticed that the people who are most enthusiastic about it are never particularly impressive themselves.

Overall, I think it gets far more credit than it deserves, from both it's fans and critics.

I use it rewrite work emails, that way I don't have to put any thought into formatting or punctuation it's just a stream of consciousness that then translates into a proper formatted email. But that is pretty much it.

If my private life I don't use AI for anything, not because I have a particular hatred of AI, I just don't have anything that can think that it could be used for.

If the technology suddenly became unavailable, I'd be absolutely fine. I don't think it's a good idea to become too reliant on AI anyway, it leaves you vulnerable to price gouging. I like to keep all my thinking inside my own brain where it's free.

If it’s so useful, then surely all these AI companies are making money, right? I’ll wait

I have no opinion on this conversation, i just wanna acknowledge your username and how it fit the conversation.

The problem is that before we reach a compromise between usability, efficiency, fairness, and the jobs it will destroy, we’ll already be screwed...

LLMs improved significantly throughout 2024 until the first half 2025 and have now leveled off to more incremental gains instead of doubling benchmark scores within a few months. I think those days may be over. However, people who dismissed LLMs in 2024 and 2025 won’t have a correct understanding of their current capabilities. They’re useful and will probably continue with incremental improvements, but they’re also not a silver bullet that will magically produce high quality work without a competent human at the helm contributing most of the critical thinking and creativity.