[CaptainFever]

I really wish BrandShield didn't use AI as a marketing term. It just looks like it's doing a generic ctrl-F on webpages?

Then things like this happen, and people think "ooh AI is bad, the bubble must burst" when this has nothing to do with that in the first place, and the real issue was that they sent a "fraud/phishing report" rather than a "trademark infringement" report.

Then I also wish that people who knew better, that this really has nothing to do with AI (like, this is obviously not autonomously making decisions any more than a regular program is), to stop blindly parroting and blaming it as a way to get more clicks, support and rage.

[pdpi]

I find that businesses that bill themselves as ${TOOL}-users instead of ${PROBLEM}-solvers are, as a general rule, problematic. I couldn't possibly care any less whether a product is built on AI or a clever switch statement or a bazillion little gnomes doing the work by hand. I care that it solves a problem.

AI does need to die. Not so much because LLMs are bad, but rather because, like "big data" and "blockchain" and many other buzzwordy tools before it, it is a solution looking for a problem.

[7thaccount]

The AI hype is annoying in my field as well. AI can have its uses, but we already figured out where to use it in my field ages ago. That doesn't stop people from hyping nothing though.

[CobrastanJorji]

Yes. If your business solves a real customer problem and uses "blockchain" to do it, that's great, but you should describe yourself as a tool to solve the problem. If you mention blockchain on the homepage of your product at all, it should be treated with suspicious. It's a sign that you're speaking to investors and fools and not to savvy customers.

One exception: personal projects. "This is an NES emulator that is built in Rust, and it uses Rust because I wanted to learn Rust" is a perfectly good description of a project (but not a business).

[pdpi]

> This is an NES emulator that is built in Rust, and it uses Rust because I wanted to learn Rust

Arguably, in this scenario, learning rust is the "business need" and the NES emulator is the tool :)

But yeah, exactly. A blockchain is, technically, just a content-addressable linked list. A Merkle tree is the same, as a tree. Git's core data structure is a DAG version of this. These things are useful. Yet nobody calls Git "blockchain technology", because what we all care about is Git's value as a version control tool.

[johnnyanmac]

> and people think "ooh AI is bad, the bubble must burst" when this has nothing to do with that in the first place

That haphazard branding and parroting is exactly why the bubble needs to burst. Bubbles bursting take out the gritters and rarely actually kills off all the innovation in the scene (it kills a lot, though. I'm not trying to dismiss that).

[kombookcha]

Exactly this, if you give a hoot about actual useful applications for AI, there is a great need to clear out all the grifters and scammers attracted by the initial hype cycle.

[CaptainFever]

It's possible they were using LLMs (or even just traditional ML algorithms) to choose if a certain webpage was fraud/phishing instead of mere trademark infringement, though. In this case it makes sense that one would be angry that a sapient being didn't first check if the report was accurate before sending it off.

[acka]

More than the hypothetical risk of Earth being consumed by a paperclip-making machine, I believe the real and present danger in the use of ML and AI technology lies in humans making irresponsible decisions about where and how to apply these technologies.

For example, in my country, we are still dealing with the fallout from a decision made over a decade ago by the Tax Department. They used a poorly designed ML algorithm to screen applicants claiming social benefits for fraudulent activity. This led to several public inquiries and even contributed to the collapse of a government coalition. Tens of thousands of people are still suffering from being wrongly labeled as fraudulent, facing hefty fines and being forced to repay so-called fraudulent benefits.

[stevoski]

They’re talking about Australia, and the robodebt scheme.

Read the Wikipedia article and you’ll probably feel outraged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

[shakna]

Unfortunately it seems that the thinking is more farspread, and this was the Netherlands [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42365837

[CaptainFever]

Perhaps in certain cases requiring someone to sign off, and take the blame if anything happens, would help alleviate this problem. Much like how engineers need to sign off on construction plans.

(Layman here, obviously.)

[jerf]

If the legal system is not itself either fundamentally corrupted or completely razzle-dazzled by the AI hype... and I mean those as serious clauses that are at least somewhat in question... then there are going to be some very disappointed people losing a lot of money or even going to jail when they find out that as far as the legal system is concerned, there already is legally speaking some person or entity composed of persons (a corporation) responsible for these actions, and it is already not actually legally possible to act like a bull in a china shop and then cover it over by just pointing to your internal AI and disclaiming all responsibility.

The legal system already acts that way when the issue is in its own wheelhouse: https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-us... The lawyers did not escape by just chuckling in amusement, throwing up their hands, and saying "AIs! Amimrite?"

The system is slow and the legal tests haven't happened yet but personally I see no reason to believe that the legal system isn't going to decide that "the AI" never does anything and that "the AI did it!" will provide absolutely zero cover for any action or liability. If anything it'll be negative as hooking an AI directly up to some action and then providing no human oversight will come to be ipso facto negligence.

I actually consider this one of the more subtle reasons this AI bubble is substantially overblown. The idea of this bubble is that AI will just replace humans wholesale, huzzah, cost savings galore! But if companies program things like, say, customer support with AIs, and can then just deploy their wildest fantasies straight into AIs with no concern about humans being in the loop and turning whistleblower or anything, like, making it literally impossible to contact humans, making it literally impossible to get solutions, and so forth, and if customers push these AIs to give false or dangerous solutions, or agree to certain bargains or whathaveyou, and the end result is you trade lots of expensive support calls for a company-ending class-action lawsuit, the utility of buying the AI services to replace your support staff sharply goes down. Not necessarily to zero. Doesn't have to go to zero. It just makes the idea that you're going to replace your support staff with a couple dozen graphics cards a much more incremental advantage rather than a multiplicative advantage, but the bubble is priced like it's hugely multiplicative.

[rjmunro]

Please say something like "here in [insert country name]", or "back home in [insert country name]" intead of "in my country", otherwise we have no idea what you are talking about.

[acka]

Unfortunately I can no longer edit my original comment. It is about the so-called "Toeslagenaffaire" (childcare benefits scandal)[1] in the Netherlands.

Also, here is a blog post[2] warning about the improper use of algorithmic enforcement tools like the one that was used in this scandal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...

[2] https://eulawenforcement.com/?p=7941

[jandrese]

When AI is being used as a cover for the bad/questionable behavior the company was already doing then there is no bubble to burst. The performance of the "AI" doesn't matter, only that it throws up a smoke shield in front of the company when people call to complain about the abuse.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I fear that ship has already sailed. I think the grifters and scammers have already abused the term enough that even decent uses of it are now tainted. I know that the two aren't strictly the same, but I would suggest using "Machine Learning" instead, which I think has more respectable connotations.

[rsynnott]

AS IS TRADITION.

(After the previous AI bubble, no-one mentioned the dread term for about 20 years, instead using the safely ultra-broad umbrella term.)

[rsynnott]

I mean, whether this has anything to do with AI or not (I’d buy that they’re using LLMs to write abuse letters or similar) it fits very nicely into the general pattern of AI breaking the internet through an endless deluge of worthless misleading spam. So, perhaps call it honorary AI?