You would really find this next video interesting. During this Tech Report interview, El emphasizes this very point: the technology can do lots of things, but NOT all the things the techbros are claiming. The gap between the hype and the reality is not just misleading, it's downright dangerous.
Took me a while to get around to watching the whole thing, but it's great. She's of course right that the actually useful things the AI's can do gets buried in all the hype.
To add to her examples, one major concern of mine is that it's become very popular for leaders at my company (and likely many others) to use LLM's to summarizing large amounts of email, documentation etc. to save them time and stay informed. ...but there is a huge problem with this. LLM's are actually really bad at writing good summaries. Sure, they seem to be good at it. They can turn a huge wall of text into a nice, neat, little blurb that is way more digestible, but there are huge fundamental problems with the actual quality of the information. LLM's just fundamentally lack the ability to know if a particular piece of information is important, or just something added in for flavor.
One example I saw a while ago was when I said something to my boss in a weekly summary about how "Job X ran despite major system issues that the team had to do XYZ to mitigate." And his AI summary reduced this to just "Job X ran." ....so the summary lost all of the actual information that even made it worth mentioning.
In short, I think these AI's have often not been extremely helpful to individual contributors to do much of the real work, but the way senior leaders use it is very different and way more troublesome. It seems to really help them FEEL more informed and advised but the information is often really bad. Leadership seems to like the tools a lot more than we peons do, and it's really to the detriment of all.
What I said about summaries is important, but I also know some people who work under leaders who just have full on AI psychosis. They trust the machine god for EVERYTHING and ONLY trust the machine.
