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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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"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.
Yeah, but it's got that in common with a frighteningly large number of people...
See management, marketing, streaming, social media, etc.....
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.
Nope, pedant away. That's a better way to convey what I was trying to say. Thanks.
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.
If that's your reasoning then genes and genetics fall into the same bucket.
not even close.
Well, no.
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.