AI Pullback Has Officially Started

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The gulf between actual AI performance and AI hype is deep and cavernous, and we have the data to prove it. A recent MIT report found that 95% of AI pilots didn’t increase a company’s profit or productivity. A recent METR report also found that AI coding tools actually slow developers down. Why? Well, generative AI models, even the very latest ones, often get things wrong and “hallucinate”, which requires considerable human oversight to correct. IT consultants Gartner attempted to quantify this and found that AI agents fail to complete office tasks around 70% of the time. Simply put, the amount of human oversight necessary, even for simple tasks, almost always undermines whatever productivity gains are made. In other words, in the vast majority of cases, it is more productive not to use AI than to use AI. Yet despite all the evidence, AI is still being shoehorned in everywhere and being praised as the next industrial revolution. Or is it? Because there is also mounting data that the world is beginning to turn its back on this questionable technology.

Possibly the best example of this is a new report from Wiley.

This is their second ExplanAItions study, which aims to assess how AI is being used and perceived in…