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What would it mean to take a deflationary stance towards Generative AI?

I’ve been thinking recently about what a deflationary stance towards GenAI would look like. It’s a term I’ve often associated with Richard Rorty’s style, in which he is prone to ‘fuzzing up’ distinctions and trying to recover the pragmatic questions lurking behind overblown discussions. Filip Vostal captures it here in relation to the acceleration debate here:

Drawing on Thomas Osborne, I would define deflationary approach as a sensitivity –or a “weak” method– that contributes to an assessment of whether or not acceleration features aforementioned proportions, especially those that are couched as inherently negative, dangerous, and apocalyptic

https://scholar.archive.org/work/y45p5m7borcipcca6kjle73yly/access/wayback/https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/RPUB/article/download/79243/4564456559250

It’s a style of teasing out what’s really at stake in a debate, getting beyond the poetics which have drawn in partisans in order to move the discussion forward in a minor key with a lighter tone.

Would would this look like with Generative AI? I think a starting point is describing it as just ‘software’, into which an enormous amount of capital and excitement has been invested, which has become subject to overblown claims from multiple conflicting sites. It’s fundamentally overhyped as an object and we need to get beyond this.

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