has AI actually done anything useful besides generate images and lie to people?
The current generation of AI has its uses and it will improve from here. Generative AI is here to stay, but just like the internet in 2000 there is a lot of money going into AI related investments that will not deliver.
One of the biggest things driving the hype is the common belief that current AI is actually intelligent (artificial general intelligence), or will be soon. The smart people know that we’ve hit a dead end when it comes to real intelligence. Neural networks will play a role in AGI, but we need to understand what fundamentally makes intelligence before we can recreate it. Right now we’re throwing petabytes of data at neural networks and hoping intelligence magically appears.