586
Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
586 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
87994 readers
3345 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
He's sadly right.. My wife is Chinese, she watches AI Chinese dramas and she has told me that most of China watch AI dramas. And Gen Z watch AI, Everyone younger than 30 relies on AI.
Now before you downvote me, I'm 37 and I've worked in IT since I was 19.. AI gives me nothing I can't find for myself. The only time I've used AI was when chat GPT was fresh and new and I told it to be more sarcastic and snarky in it's answers and I argued with it for 2-3 mins before I got bored.
Humans are much better at arguing with me and being sarcastic to me.
I don't care for AI, Turn off all the air conditioners and AI burns out.
What are AI Chinese dramas? How much is AI? Just the script, or is the entire thing AI animated? Where do you see these programs?
There’s an entire genre of these weird “fruit Love Island” AI dramas that pop up on my TikTok. It’s terribly animated anthropomorphic fruit, and the plot is usually that the wife is cheating on the husband with the boss and gets pregnant.
I have a family member addicted to these (well, not Chinese...). It's pretty much all 100% slop, the voices, the animation, the script. My head hurts just seeing how it cuts every 5 seconds when I casually see it. The voices are so horribly soulless. The writing is inane and tortuously paced.
But people eat it up. Similar to (and large audience overlap) with people who toss massive money at shitty mobile games.
I'm not sure about the script or voice acting as I don't understand Mandarin, but visually the ENTIRE thing is AI rendered.
Are you responding to something specific from this article? I feel like we might have read completely different articles.
If it's not that, I'm seeing people almost everywhere hunched on their phones, watching AI-generated summaries of... what? soap opera episodes and whole movies. And those people complaining about the low quality of education when they're so fucking focused much on getting a piece of paper just to be hired even for a department store attendant.
And I've rejected their code for unnecessary complexity and issues they overlooked all three times so actually nothing was solved. AI does not increase productivity. At all. Study after study after study has confirmed this. AI can spew out what sounds reasonable to people of low skill. That's it.
I don't use AI, but I've watched enough other people who's intelligence I used to respect devolve into token monkeys who understand nothing anymore.
No I read that. My experience is that relative skill doesn't matter. Introduce AI and you'll churn out slop, not solve problems
I agree its pandoras box but I disagree about the quality of life it brings. What it is creating is larger electric bills that is strangling the lower class, killing consumer low end computers which also harms the lower class, creating a dependency which will likely increase in price, lowering childrens critical thinking (according to studies private schools are not being as affected), killing jobs, oh and the fuck ton of effect it has on climate change which also affects the lower class more.
Yeah but you see, everyone who's gun-ho on AI doesn't seem to be bother to give two fucks. It's bat-shit people are chasing this like their lives depend on it. They don't give a fuck about the lower class, they never have, it's a new shiny toy, and until something catastrophic happens, nothing is going to change.
Eat the rich.
It makes you seem more productive in most metrics that corporate america seems to measure, but that doesn't really mean anything. Even if most of what the current AIs produce would be good quality (and it's not, its mediocre at best), one hallucination costs you more time than everything it saved you.
I just don't get why people like you exist. You guys have the stupidest fucking arguments for why not wanting to use the regurgitation machine that murders the environment and causes people to kill themselves is bad.
But, like, do you still use NFTs? That was the future. It was so the future. Same fucking arguments from the same fucking mouth-breathing dipshits.
And using AI does not even make you faster or better at what you do. It can increase output, and it can cause you to do a shit job, and it can falate your ego so you think you are soooo much better and bigger than everyone else, you big strong muscly man, you. You're basically just saying that workers can never and should never have any fucking downtime, ever. They cannot stop. They must always, always produce, more and more. And, like, fuck all the way off. You don't need to output more. You do not need to be faster. You don't need AI, even if it was as good as people pretend it is, which it is not!
Because AI sucks. It isn't good at anything other than replicating an amalgamation of the data that is fed into it. Anyone that says it is good at any other thing is just shit at that specific thing and doesn't know any better. LLMs are just huge giant matrices full of coefficients matching language segments. They don't know jackshit. They have relatively small context windows compared to even the dumbest motherfucker on this planet and people working on making LLMs better are running out of shortcuts to make them better. The money they have been lent needs to start making it back. And they can't make money because they are subsidizing everyone using AI with that venture capital because it still hasn't made a fucking dime yet.
Don't worry, guys. We just need to keep feeding more data into it! It's so much better, guys, I swear! This one won't hallucinate all the time, bro, I swear! Just one more model, it's so close!
That's why those people do not code or do those other things, and, surprisingly, most of those people don't suddenly think they are now better than a person who has done... Just... The smallest amount of actual training to become good at that thing.
You got that AI psychosis in you, buddy. Ask your AI friend for the nearest person to get you the hell away from it.
If only telling you how brainwashed you are would actually fox things. Let me know when you have enough tokens to reply to me.
This is complete fantasy. I've personally watched like 10 SEs decide LLMs are the best things since sliced bread and talk up how much more productive they are and without exception they're all to varying degrees just worse at their job. Same for every other role I've observed as well, though I have fewer data points.
Okay but one of those is an artform and the other is physical labor.
Programming doesn't really equate to physical labor like that.