[Sharlin]

To be fair, that’s not exactly a new thing, it’s just sensitive to the exact phase of the Great AI Freeze/Thaw Cycle. A lot of now-ordinary automation used to be "AI" until it become commonplace and no longer buzzword-worthy and thus no longer regarded as "AI", and/or an AI winter hit.

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".

[hn_throwaway_99]

I understand why companies try to brand themselves as the latest and greatest tech innovation. What I don't understand is why it works or who falls for it. It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI.

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.

[parineum]

> It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI.

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.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> The people who are being marketed to with the AI term don't have any idea what that mean and AI

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.

[Sharlin]

The continuous/tracking/predictive AF modes of Canon’s EOS (D)SLR cameras were famously called "AI Servo" and "AI Focus", terms coined somewhere in the late 80s I believe. The early implementations were simple dead-reckoning-based control systems, hardly "AI" even by the standards of that time.

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.

[array_key_first]

Well I think most investors are dumb as rocks. I'm not sure most even know what a transformer is, or what LLM stands for.

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.

[secretsatan]

I think just the co opting of the word intelligence is the bigger con.

[rightbyte]

I think it is some sort of virtue signaling of being grifters and abusing the system for short term profit etc.

[etempleton]

VCs, PE and investors in general. Not all, but enough. Watch CNBC or Yahoo News for even 10 minutes—the sheer stupidity and mania around AI right now is frankly terrifying.

[dfxm12]

It doesn't make sense though. If a company builds automation and I need a company to build automation for me, that's good to market yourself that way.

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.

[Sharlin]

I don’t think most people responsible for buying these things think like that at all. They know about ChatGPT but don’t have any idea how it could be made to do technical things for them. Normal people just don’t think like that.