A lot of start-ups are hyping themselves as deep-learning or something close to that in order to make themselves appear 'hot'. Recently I looked at a company that had absolutely nothing to do with deep-learning or even any kind of machine learning whatsoever and that still managed to sprinkle the various buzz-words with great regularity throughout their investor targeted docs.

What I don't get about this behavior is this: It won't work, and in fact is a net negative, so why do it in the first place?

Investing is a trust thing, if you break trust before you even get to talk to your potential investor there is no way you will raise money from them.