> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence
What a time to be alive
What a time to be alive
Last time that AI was big before DL it was the "big data" fad and everything had to be big data. Marketing has never not been about how to disguise "what we already do" as the newest buzzword that customers (or investors) want to hear.
The same goes, of course, for all the non-AI fads like "the cloud" or "NoSQL".
I remember in the years before the pandemic that I would joke that all you had to do was "sprinkle in some blockchain" to your VC pitch and your valuation would automatically go up by tens of millions. It seemed dumb to me then and it seems dumb to me now.
The people who are being marketed to with the AI term don't have any idea what that mean and AI, as a marketing term (the only way it's ever been, so far, commercially used) means a lot more than transformers. My dishwasher has "AI" because it has sensors that can detect where the most dishes are.
The marketing term really just means that the product changes it's behavior without user input. A simple "if...then" is AI.
AI has been used as a marketing term for at least a decade now but LLMs are poisoning the brand because they're, largely, implemented in almost exclusively user hostile ways.
Slightly ironically, now in the mirrorless era, and AF algorithms actually based on DL subject recognition and complex predictive algorithms, Canon has retired the "AI" label.
To clarify, I'm mainly talking about B2B-type businesses where the marketing is to investors or other large enterprises. Despite the fact that it's popular and in vogue to think of VCs and business leaders as idiots, most of them actually do understand what AI is and the difference between "modern" AI and basic automation.
And even if you're talking about end consumers, I feel like there is a growing backlash against AI and people will think of a business that touts their "AI dishwasher" or whatever as obvious bullshit and see it as a net negative.
Same thing with blockchain. I talked to many, many non-tech people who were very excited about blockchain. Most could not explain what, exactly, blockchain is.
If a company says "we build automation using AI", ehh, I'd probably cut out the middleman and use AI myself...
This is different from marketing around the cloud or big data.
9i - "internet"
10g - "grid"
11g - "also grid"
12c - "cloud"
26ai - "ai"
various other examples. One really annoying thing is this has also happened in open source projects too - generic things that, sure, help out with AI tasks are now "AI" things.
Remember the Internet was first hot and everything was iThis or Active That. iPhone still has i.
Remember… well not, me, I wasn’t alive… when radiation was cool and Radioactive was in.
Everyone always wants to be cool.
They’re incentived to do so because apparently investors don’t understand the difference.
If the market can remain irrational longer than a fundamentals-driven investor can remain solvent, is it irrational to bet on the market remaining irrational?
If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.
Last time around was when "fuzzy logic" came out, I think?
The reason the term "machine learning" was even invented was because it was one of the AI winters and an euphemism was needed because "AI" was more of a swearword than a buzzword.
which used to be called Statistics
which used to be called “math” or maybe “applied science.”
Obviously the underlying tech and research changed along the way… but not as much as it would seem. We’re still doing matrix operations and gradient descent and softmax, all of which has been around for a while.