News stories describing the reality behind AI hype just keep coming, and they’re starting to remind me of Molly White’s excellent Web3 Is Going Just Great site.

Turns out LLMs won’t so much solve the climate crisis, but the energy they use will hasten it. (from The Tyee, which I encourage reading on the regular if you aren’t already)

Turns out AI “copilots” hallucinate software packages that don’t exist, which creates a security hole ready to exploit.

Those are the costs, though. What about the rewards?

Well, turns out government chatbots tell people it’s OK to break the law. So that’s a savings?

And at the absolute forefront of automation in retail, Amazon is giving up on AI-driven checkout in favor of (checks notes) scanning the bar code of the thing you’re going to buy, because the “automation” turned out to be 1000 people in India watching customers as they shop.