It’s not me saying that, but Gary Marcus saying that it turns out Generative AI was a scam. Where is he getting that? From investment companies.

Gary’s article – Turns out Generative AI was a scam (Or at least very very far from what it has been cracked up to be), available here – discusses “Breaking news from Shira Ovide at the Washington Post” (and provides a gift link to the article here) that says: “Massive investment in AI contributed ‘“’basically zero’”’ to U.S. economic growth last year, Goldman Sachs has calculated.”

Ovide reports:

“Prominent economists, including from Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, calculate that the AI buildup was directly responsible not for 92 percent or 39 percent of gains to the U.S. economy in 2025, but as little as zero.

Briggs and his Goldman Sachs colleagues recently said that investment spending on AI made “basically zero” difference in U.S. economic growth last year.”

Marcus notes: “The piece by Ovide is absolutely brutal, somewhere between tragic and comic, filled with interviews showing how some hard to swallow numbers that fit a Silicon Valley narrative rapidly became gospel in Washington – with far too little scrutiny. Not since Geoff Pullum’s Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax have I read such a deconstruction of people hearing what they wanted to hear.”

He adds: “None of what Ovide had to say about the overestimation of Generative AI should actually come as a surprise. Generative AI has been inherently unreliable from the start; none of the problems that I warned about over the last half decade has been properly solved. Large language models still hallucinate, and they still make boneheaded errors; they still lack a proper concept of reality. They often produce workslop. A recent survey called The Remote Labor Index found that they could only do 2.5% of human tasks, and that is a massive overestimate, since literally everything that requires physical labor was excluded.”

Of course, it should be noted that Marcus has been a prominent critic of modern generative AI models like ChatGPT. Here, he admits that “I don’t know that Generative AI was literally a scam” but also adds that “the people selling it have tried to sell it as if it were tantamount to artificial general intelligence, when it’s not.”

Marcus also says this: “When all is said and done, my best guess is that generative AI will have done significantly more harm to society than good. Although there are some practical use cases, such as coding, it is an inherently unreliable technology. It is ripping apart our educational system and our information ecosphere, and flooding the zone with nonconsensual deepfake porn. It is threatening the environment with data centers built on too much speculation. It is leading some people into serious mental health issues. And it may well lay waste to our economy, once banks and investors who bought the hype start to fall…The countdown to Trump leaving the AI building has begun.”

This is in stark contrast to the essay by Matt Shumer, which was discussed by Craig Ball on his blog and shared by me, where he compared the disruption of current AI technology to the disruption we all faced at the outset of the Covid pandemic. Shumer says: “The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is ‘really getting better’ or ‘hitting a wall’ — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant.”

Who wants to see a debate between these two on the benefits of generative AI? I do! 😁

Where does the truth lie? In my opinion, somewhere in the middle – as it always does when you’re presented with two extreme views on a topic. The best way to get to the truth is to use these tools and decide for yourself. I’ve done that – and continue to do that – and find that they continue to more and more amazing things, while also making regular mistakes too. As with all technology (or with any human work product as well), you have to verify the results.

So, what do you think? Do you agree that Generative AI was a scam? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using Ralph Losey’s Visual Muse, using the term “robot lawyer looking at a computer workstation with the word ‘SCAM’ on the screen” (starting prompt).

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.