The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday, April 4, edition that increasingly, generative artificial intelligence seems like a waste of our collective time and money. The Globe's guest columnist Kean Birch writes that while generative AI technologies, like Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT, have some playful uses, they potentially come with enormous social costs and limited social benefit. To understand these social costs, we have to understand generative AI. It is not an autonomous, intelligent system, able to think and decide like we do. Instead, as Emily Bender and colleagues emphasize, generative AI is a mimic of human action, parroting back our words and images. It does not think, it guesses -- and often quite badly in what is termed AI hallucination. Understanding generative AI as probabilistic systems highlights the social costs that follow from their development. AI depends upon computing capacity: The more AI we employ, the more computing capacity we need. Not only does this take computing capacity away from other, potentially more useful activities, it requires an enormous amount of energy. These environmental costs are well known, but they will get significantly worse as AI spreads.