494
Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Technology
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It isn't about content generation at all. It's about pattern recognition and prediction, which, in the hands of those with the most power to change the world, offers insights into our collective behavior that rulers from every age would have committed genocide to get. AI will tell them how to better build the prison the poor are being impoverished into.
It has the same flaw as every other overreaching evil. We outnumber them. A significant number on our side is willing to kill the other side.
Ima die in the crossfire for sure. But the evildoers always assume they are going to win and they literally never do. They always lose. Expensively.
It’s a dying echo. Nothing more.
Yes but we are effectively disconnected from our mutual self interest. We should already have risen up together and our complacency is a testament to their existing ability to pacify us.
Stop spreading criti-hype! Zuck didn’t invent a mind-control ray with targeted advertising, and Sam Altman doesn’t run a terminator factory with GenAI.
Wtf are you talking about? Do you even know the nature of data usage today? You can't identify reality from science fiction?
AI enables them to better do what they have already been doing with analytics and user data. They are already doing it and have been for decades.
I've seen it first hand on smaller software products during analytics reviews and telemetry design discussions during preproduction through product launch and post launch. I know the questions that gets asked, the purpose of a telemetry hook for a user action, heard what they wished they could track and why. I know how they can cohort a user base, how they extrapolate and predict user behavior and user characteristics from that data to target content. There's laws already written to prevent some data collection because of what is known can be done. That's a small software product with a few millions users, not Amazon or Google who have billions of users, many of whom give them access to their entire phone telemetry at all times, cross device access and service wide account tracking, across decades of their lives. Location, region, timezone, battery usage, app usage, age, phone numbers, address, gender, mac ids, wifi connections and data usage etc etc etc.
With just my gender and age, you can make predictions, of some accuracy, using existing research data, about my life, who I am, what I think and how I behave. Every single piece of data more allows further clarity and breadth. That knowledge is what gives them more and more accurate predictions about me, you and all of us. Now they want cameras everywhere, microphones everywhere, OS real ID and VPNs to be banned so there is no anonymity. They want as much data as possible because they now have a data pattern recognition system(LLMs) that can effectively make use of that amount of data.
FFS, this isn't science fiction anymore, it's here, now. And those companies have never had your, or my, interests or well-being in mind. They will use it for power, as they always have.
"Generative" "AI" is about generation yes
"Generative" is a misnomer. It will never generate anything new, it can only regurgitate existing ideas based on patterns that already exist. It's very good at pattern recognition and summarizing, but lacks the ability to form a distinct new idea.
It's only good at summarizing things which have coherence to its training set. Any ability to summarize input outside of its training is accidental.
It will never generate something novel. Whether it will generate something "new" depends on your definition of "new," which is a little more ambiguous than "novel."
Sorry if I'm being too pedantic.
Sure, but then neither will most people.
Shhh... Let the haters hate. Hate is all they have. It's the only thing that makes them feel superior.
Nope, pedant away. That's a better way to convey what I was trying to say. Thanks.
If that's your reasoning then genes and genetics fall into the same bucket.
not even close.
That's an interesting thought. Genetics is largely a mixing and copying process with occasional "hallucinations" in the form of transcription errors. Most of these errors result in the termination of the hallucinated code. Hallucinations that damage the termination process result in cancer. In the larger sense of evolution, there's a robust external "review" process. Environmental pressures, predation, and resource availability weed out most of the mistakes and selects the results most likely to succeed.
Well, no.
It's generating a prediction of our behavior for them to use to better control us.