people conflate "AI is overhyped" with "AI is useless" and neither is quite right. the backlash is mostly against the hype cycle not the tech itself. give it 2 years
"Let them eat cake...", I wonder what the 'taken out of context' trigger will be this time around
In some sense it's probably acting as a lightning rod for resentment, and that resentment is combined with marketing spiel from the model companies alongside well-placed concern over the impact of AI on employment.
Certainly in my own life it's made some things easier. But that just means I move on to the next thing quicker - the treadmill never stops. Does AI improve my life yet? I'm not so certain. It also has huge environmental costs, pushes up energy prices, pushes up computing hardware prices and sucks attention away from other things.
Is it cool? Yes. Is it likely to be society changing. Yes. Does it make anyone's lives better? TBC.
0. No one wants a datacenter in their backyard or hooked up to the grid while the electricity burden is carried by households. People are afraid of losing their property values and being unable to move away if a DC is built nearby - effectively being trapped there. People in Memphis are breathing in gas fumes from the XAI datacenter there. There are concerns about corrosion byproducts making its way into the aquifers from DC waste water. If DC construction takes the cheap option no sound insulation is installed and people can’t sleep and some even lose their hearing: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
People are pissed that towns and cities are bypassing public approval to placate corporate builders.
1. People have been told to fear for their jobs
2. Many people believe labs have stolen vast amounts of intellectual property
3. Engineers are being pressured to use AI and told they “aren’t prompting right” if/when it doesn’t work for their use case
I can go on. But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.
I think it exacerbates the points you make. "You mean, you want to take all the IP, immediately force the tech on us, maybe make my job redundant, and you want billions in funding for it!?"
AI companies are becoming a catch-all / symbolic lightning rod for "the ruling class".
That argument applies better to blast furnaces than to data centers, but I don't see people complaining about steel. Data centers just don't take up much space or power in the scope of industrial manufacturing.
Your other arguments are legitimate, but "it's a waste of electricity" and "data centers make some significant difference to a nontrivial number of people" are not the same propositions.
Some of these data centers are multiple orders of magnitude bigger than a blast furnace.
I think people are pissed that they're subsidizing the R+D cost of their own unemployment.
There's just no way it's a significant factor in overall sentiment.
They see that AI is capable and fear it.
If you watch an AI and dig into the details of everything it is doing, you can see it repeatedly banging into these guard rails. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. As a human being, I bang into those guard rails all the time too. That's where they came from in the first place, to let humans bang into them. And we've built a lot of them.
However, in a lot of the rest of the world their experience with AI much more resembles that of the more critical voices that post here. A lawyer who uses an AI that makes two correct citations and then an incorrect one has many fewer automated guard rails to work with. It is relatively easy to imagine a system that at least verifies the citation exists (I've heard that's easier said than done due to the system depending on humans to resolve sloppy references but still it's feasible), but the task of deciding if the AI correctly used the citation, either in the abstract sense of it being correct or in the sense of it being the best way to use it to advance the current case, is a vastly harder decision than "ah, that change failed to compile, try again".
Accounting seems like another good example. Yes, it has the obvious guard rail of "do the books balance", but that's the beginning of accounting, not the end. It's difficult to put up guard rails for how the accounting is done from there. An accountant will experience an AI accountant as doing OK sometimes but making really dumb decisions that couldn't be caught by anything other than human review, and I have to imagine that the lack of learning and the way the AI will tend to make the same mistakes over and over must be incredibly aggravating.
I think there's probably more truth to "AI is useless" than we may see. I think a lot more people than we realize have had the experience of using AI a while, putting some trust in it, then having that trust grotesquely violated when it says something stupid in an email or makes boneheaded errors in a spreadsheet. We're maybe just now exiting the portion of the hype cycle where it is simply culturally unacceptable to criticize the AI and entering the part where it is culturally both acceptable and expected, and we software engineers may look on in bafflement at the other fields and their complaints because it's working for us, what's your problem?
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/
When I look at the clerical work from a software engineer's point of view, I find it nuts how few guardrails there are - clerical workers would have a far easier time producing work with a low error rate if there were some guardrails put up, but that's just not an investment/culture that the field seems to be interested in.
The two related points around AI are that 1) guardrails would make the clerical work relatively easier for AI and 2) because assistants are so error-prone anyway, the bar for AI isn't all that high.
Some problems that seem straightforward at first blush might in fact be AGI-complete--that is they require actual judgment and reasoning to solve. I'm not making the specific claim that the clerical work you're describing is one of those, but it could take a large amount of data modeling work to determine whether it is.
This is what makes finding productive AI (EDIT: I mean ML, AI == AGI and we don't have that) applications so challenging. It's why my money is firmly not on a big AI revolution anytime soon, despite the demonstrated capability of language models.
It really doesn't help to have stuff like this in print:
> a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech.
They just take these claims completely uncritically and move on. Where is the productivity increase? Where are the cured diseases? Where are the improvements in education and green tech? So far, it's all a big fat zero. Maybe in 2yrs some of this will actually be true? Is that the hope?
This is scammer shit. If any of this was true you wouldn't have to ask for extra time.
EDIT: The fact we're all calling this "AI" is part of the problem. It's not AI yet, it's still ML. The Overton red-shift comes for us all in the end.
I'm sorry but all of this is to be determined but if the present is any indicator LLMs tend to make things distinctly worse, not better. Any areas of "potential" still rely on massive amounts of manual human labor, hardly a trillion dollar industry.
"Useful" in the sense of cheap parlor tricks, useful in the real sense that it enables mass surveillance on the cheap; but actually useless for the material lives of people around the world.
I'm sure it's great if you're a rich tech bro.
- This thing is very consistently lying and misleading people. Do I want to introduce more deception and confusion into the world?
- people don't actually want to use this.
- I don't actually want to use this.
- Something about this feels wrong.
I dropped it. I have another couple of big language learning projects made with 100% human blood sweat and tears, long projects over many years. Zero LLMs or voice models used for anything. Those continue to grow and are loved, and I feel great about them.
Pretty bold statement to say it's useless for most people outside of tech. Almost every "normal" person I know including my in-laws are using it regularly. It's becoming the go-to for asking questions rather than Google, Bing, etc.
And the privacy battle was lost 25 years ago. People don't really care if corporations know about their search history (Google), or their private lives (Facebook). You're beating a dead horse there.
Well, the attempt to claim that speaks to something, but the claim doesn't really, because it's not true.
Let's not even try to get people to think about people who are not them, people who are in need, people with disabled children, whatever. I don't know about the US because it has very few spaces where people actually live together like humans would, but for the majority of the world, at least in major cities: nevermind healthcare or pensions and whatnot, just consider garbage disposal, and maintenance of plumbing and sewer system, the electric grid, and lots of other "small" things like that. The shit we take for granted and corporations moan about because it cuts into their profits and reduces the costs they can externalize slightly. Regulations that say they can't just put saw dust and some heroin in food, that type of thing. That came to be because that's the type of shit they just could not stop doing.
If you could quicksave and experience that just for yourself, without fucking life up really badly for everyone else and for decades, you totally should. I don't think most people who talk this stuff from myopic bubbles would last even a week. Because they don't think so well, we know this from the arguments, and are not likeable, we know this from how they don't consider other people. So to me that's absolute bottom of the food chain energy talking about the Ark B. Pure, pristine, unadulterated projection.
You were just denied an application because some LLM decided you fit a certain statistical pattern. Where did the LLM go wrong? What were the steps taken to make that decision? Who can you appeal to? Nobody. AI bureaucracy would just keep chugging along, making decisions based on prejudices and patterns it finds but doesn't feel.
Rainer Mühlhoff makes some compelling arguments in trying to warn people of the dangers of an AI bureaucracy/state.
With LLMs you get incompetence cut off from human embodiment and any chance of empathy, baked into opaque black-boxes, and automated and scaled.
We should be arriving to build things that are correct, not saying "stuff sucks already, let's make more stuff that sucks."
Automate corporate bullshit. Keep your hands off the government. They are literally the only ones incentivized to not use you as toilet paper.
Meanwhile, there are all these intellectual jobs which are hard for humans to do, so we assume they're just hard in general. Look closer, though, and many don't involve human social interaction, only require a small amount of good taste, and don't have any physical component.
This is really naïve in the long run, since you ultimately cannot solve social problems with technical solutions.
It's always techies that fail to realize the second / third and forth order of events when this level of disruption is measured by the number of mass layoffs you can do in each quarter.