Exactly right. Parent poster is conflating the investment in “AI” since 2022 (almost exclusively meant to mean LLMs, like ChatGPT) and specialized “AI” systems (almost exclusively “machine learning” systems).

A LLM is just about useless for any sort of surveillance or data analysis tasks. The bigger fear with LLM proliferation is as a propaganda machine, astrotufing the whole Internet with mass LLM-generated bullshit.