Late Stage Capitalism

Generative AI is the one people tend to hate, but it's still not a grift; more like grifters are ancillary to it. Grifters try to jump on it like they jump on anything they can hype and make a quick buck, but the funny thing about it is if anyone is actually making easy money that way, it's the ones who are popping up as fast businesses providing a frontend for an already-existing model (the cheapest way to attempt profiting). But even some of these crash and burn because they do a free tier to get users and attempt the "grow until you're big then majorly monetize" thing, but can't sustain this due to the high costs of generative AI and bleed investor money. And the major corps doing generative AI? They're just burning money like it's going out of style, training massive models with massive datasets.

So (in the western AI context, can't speak for China) it's a capitalist style race, but it's more of a race to see who can position themself as market leader than it is some kind of easy cash infusion.

It's not like crypto or NFTs where it can be called an actual scam. Generative AI does do something that can be functionally useful and/or entertaining. It's just complicated because beyond a baseline of it not being total crap, there all kinds of questions about where it is actually useful and for what, and the ethics of pushing it in this or that area by whom.