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I don’t think there’s a single serious critic who says AI’s not useful? The concerns I see are about content rights, worker impacts, environmental effects, epistemological threats, or media manipulation. But that’s all predicated on the idea that it *does* work, often too well for people to manage…

There actually have been studies showing it's not useful.

I'm familiar. And there are also plenty of examples in the real world of people doing things like having an LLM explain a confusing medical diagnosis in plain English language, which they found reassuring. (And yes, they can be inaccurate, but they don't find that worse than no explanation at all.)

Then why would you say there are no serious critics saying AI is not useful? Are you questioning the integrity of those studies? And if an authoritative-sounding source I've been told I could trust told me something wrong, I might be reassured as well and think I'm better off. But I'd be wrong.

Quite frankly the idea that people are having complicated medical diagnoses incorrectly explained to them in ways that could lead them to do things that would further harm their health is abhorrent.

Oh, it's worse than that. Big AI has made tools that are actively telling kids to self-harm, increasingly often leading to deaths. And *despite this*, hundreds of millions of people find these tools useful. It's like cars, they kill countless people, and yet millions of people choose them every day.