When I see a product has “Artificial Intelligence” I assume it’s a piece of crap.
And the marketing buzzwords of “AI” signal to me that it comes with a huge price tag of horrendous collateral damage.
When are companies going to realize that announcing they’re using AI isn’t the selling point they think it is? That saying that a product has AI in it immediately signals that their product is probably shoddy and unreliable just like the chatbots they call AI.
By now a lot of people realize AI has made search engines on the internet worse, they have heard the stories about weirdos getting weird over the oracle of chatbot, or maybe just stories about fake books, or lawyers, scientists, and students, getting in trouble for citing fictional court cases or science papers that came from their chatbot prompts. Or we think of the plagiarism and art theft leading to the output of AI slop. Many of us now hear “Artificial Intelligence” and associate that with being unreliable, inaccurate, and extremely untrustworthy. And we associate it with data centers driving up water utility bills, burning tires and coal waste, or commandeering a whole nuclear power plant.
Of course there’s a lot of automation and even large language models (LLMs) that do very concise specific things without all the chaos and collateral damage. But if there is a legitimate use, it’s been overwhelmed by the bullshit, and I just wonder how long it’s going to take marketing executives to realize the AI branding is gone to shit.
The AI brand is floating in a cesspool.