What's the most disappointing technology of the 21st century so far?

[highplainsdem]

35. Generative AI, which is the most harmful tech in recent decades, with only a few areas where it's

actually helpful. Incredible waste of investment money. Damaging to the environment. Far and away the biggest theft of intellectual property ever. Seriously polluting our information ecosystem, and it might never be possible to remove the tsunami of AI slop, both text and images, from the internet. Teachers being pressured by admins to use it more and more, with the aim in many cases the replacement of teachers with AI, though the increase in cheating is more and more obvious; OpenAI's CEO merely suggested we change the definition of cheating so it won't include AI.

The error/hallucination problem is apparently unsolvable, so genAI can never be trusted to give a correct response (so you get fake quotes with fake citations, the wrong number of fingers on hands, scientific illustrations that are complete lunacy and would be hilarious if the AI-generated article they're in hadn't somehow been missed and published in a journal). But the AI companies are still determined to shove genAI into everything possible anyway.

Even though its main use is fraud, from students cheating to people using AI to pretend to have knowledge and abilities they don't have, whether with writing, coding, visual art or music. You can prompt an AI image generator to spit out images of something you'd never heard of when you have no idea what it might look like - say, you choose a few Latin scientific names from a long list - in an art style you never heard of before and have no knowledge of, and the AI will come up with something, even if you have no clue whether the image or the art style is correct. That doesn't make the AI user an artist or knowledgeable, any more than a student using ChatGPT to write an essay about a book the student hasn't read has somehow gained any knowledge. GenAI is the ultimate dumbing-down and de-skilling tech.

I saw one AI peddler on Twitter tell students in a recent post to simply cheat their way through school, and then genAI would be their "superpower" after they got the degree.