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Comment by apalmer | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be some cognitive dissonance going on here. Almost all the posts here are saying, to paraphrase:

'It looks like the Grid team are using templates and some algorithms to to create websites while explicitly stating they are not using templates and using vague allusions to revolutionary AI for marketing purposes to attract investors and/or kickstarter funders. It is not a scam'

Misleading potential investors about what your going to deliver in order to get money is a scam plain and simple.

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Come on. I don't know anything about the Grid team, but this line of criticism is pretty specious, little more than Tesler's Theorem writ large: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." Once AI is successfully applied to a problem, it's dismissed as not "real intelligence."

The big critique is that you were promised AI but all you're getting are "templates and some algorithms." I mean, what do you think AI is? Magic? I hate to break it to folks, but AI is just "some algorithms" applied to a problem domain.

I think there is a distinction between misleading marketing and scamming. If you promise "revolutionary AI" and only give the customer templates and algorithms, well, at least the customer have a program that can make websites. That's useful.

A scam, on the other hand, would not deliver anything at all...period. That is because, no matter how easy it is to produce the templates and algorithms, it's just cheaper to take the money and run.

Obviously, it's scummy to mislead your consumers to get them to buy a product. But I would say that misleading your consumers to buy a product that doesn't even exist is even scummier.

I sell you an amazing AI that will write novels, given some natural language input. I deliver you a word processor and templates.

Scam?

Send me $10 and I promise that I'll send you back $20 shortly... I might change my mind and only send you back $5 but it's definitely not a scam because I sent something back

Yeah, okay, that's a fair enough point. I will need to probably figure out a better dividing line between "false advertising" and "outright scam".

False advertising is a scam, it's just one that lots of established companies get away with. I guess there is a difference between that and one of those confidence schemes where the entire organization is a fraud, but it's still a scam.

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