Just to be clear, I'm not anti-AI. I use it for coding stuff and it's definitely better than using Stack Overflow and you can argue that it's a marginal improvement to search. (I think of it as a database query aggregator, personally.)
The way it's marketed to the public right now, however, is just way off base. To understand why, you have to look more closely into why these companies are pushing for it so hard right now.
One, there's the massive layoffs in tech going on right now, and those at the top need an excuse that sounds better than "we fucked up". So in comes the robots - they took your jobs, not us! (There are high-paying jobs available in blue-collar and trade work right now btw. I don't see anyone trying to automate those away, even though you'd think it'd be a lot easier to replace manual labor...🤔)
There's a weird disconnect there that people don't seem to notice because it's outside of their bubble. Never underestimate the desire for people to avoid responsibility.
Second, is that sites like these (social media, search, most of the internet itself) runs on the ad model, which is measured by impressions, clicks, and interactions. The reason why social media has gotten more toxic over the years is because trolls, bots, scams, illegal activity, terrorism and propaganda, human trafficking, and all kinds of nasty stuff all count as "interactions". Human rights groups and government entities repeatedly tried to crack down on this stuff but nothing really happened because the money was too good.
So some studies estimate that on social media sites, more than half of the interactions you have on there are facilitated by bots - and they get away with it because people paying them for ads often don't understand the difference between that and getting actual reach. (The padded numbers strokes their ego, too, even though it's not real.)
But even then, these sites have been struggling financially in the last few years as people have gotten more digital savvy - I think most people can tell when a bot slides into your DM now since they're practically everywhere at this point.
So, in comes LLMs - to try to trick both users and advertisers into staying on there. We're going to get more advanced forms of fake profiles, fake posts, fake news, and now, even fake images that you can create on the spot, using AI. There's a reason why they poured so many billions in research and operations costs to keep this going - the foundation of the business model is at stake, after all.
Is all of this sustainable? Definitely not. AI itself has yet to turn a profit, and social media is a fiercely competitive market with low margins, operating at a loss more often than not. So when the recession hits, we're going to see it struggle, and the signs of such are already there. At this point, we're just waiting for the dominoes to fall now.
Part of the "big idea" of crypto was to replace Web2's ad-based model, which has become corrupted by its own technology and unreliable, due to the fact that these companies will never disclose what's actually going on in the background. We've given them way too much power, considering how little we know what we're getting in exchange for giving them our money. The blockchain can make this all transparent - and even take it a step further by measuring actual monetary transactions, rather than clicks/likes, which doesn't really mean much anymore.