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Many Firms Are 'AI Washing' Claims of Intelligent Products (axios.com)
Software companies are seeking to exploit the current artificial intelligence craze by "AI washing" -- exaggerating the role of AI in their products, according to a new report by Gartner, the research firm. From a report: Gartner, which tracks commercial manias through a tool it calls the Hype Cycle, compares what is currently going on in AI with a prior surge in environmental over-statement -- "greenwashing, in which companies exaggerate the environmental-friendliness of their products or practices for business benefit." The bottom line: More than 1,000 vendors say their products employ AI, but many are "applying the AI label a little too indiscriminately," Gartner says in its report. Kriti Sharma, who runs the AI team at Sage, tells Axios that a lot of companies are seeking to solve problems using AI that would be better done by humans. And what is often called AI "is just automation that you are doing," she said.
But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?
People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.
The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.
Let me just say that my claims that my patented AI helps it to roll right off into your hand are entirely true. And anyone who says otherwise is just jealous that their toilet paper isn't nearly as smart.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But then I say that about all our developers.
When you start seeing companies changing their names to include AI, start cashing out your investments. Similar to the .com bubble, and the craze over a company name having *-tronics in the 1960's (including ones having NOTHING to do with electronics), from what I remember reading.
And the reason they are doing so is to get in on the PHB-loved, Gartner "Magic Quadrant" scam game.
Lying.
I disagree, I think if anything claims of artificial intelligence have been understated for thousands of years. Wasn't it just last year the US voted to have an artificially intelligent president?
About to see it on a Tide soap box just beside HE tag!
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
Not now. Not ever.
I firmly believe that MOVIE/TV version of AI will never happen. We will get expert systems, with pretty good machine learning, but that is as close to AI as we will ever get.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
I run an analytics department for a Fortune 250, and MBA types are all over AI thinking it's the new big data. We've seen some waves over the past 5-7 years; first with predictive modeling, then machine learning, now AI. Difficult to explain in 140 characters or less that the statistical techniques aren't changing that much; but it's the data structures and computing power that are allowing us to do more and more. Analysts (aka 'data scientists') feel pressured to exaggerate their own capabilities given a disconnect between perception and reality - plus the thousand of thousands of new grads claiming to be able to make a machine think and make decisions. Most of what I've seen from AI is still fairly programmatic, very very high processing intensive automation.
It's the FUTURE'S FUTURE! Nothing says awesome like running AI in a browser while being so bloated and inefficient, it sucks up 90% of the Earth's resources! GO BLOATED AI of the FUTURE!!! So the future is down the line when the greedy ignoramus have latched onto some other hyped tech that replaces the current hyped trend.
I have said many times that AI is not as advanced as many people think. AI will not take your job any time soon, it is not a few years away, and human level AI may not be here for centuries.
So, you will not be put out of work by AI any time soon, and with that in mind UBI is not coming anytime soon.
From my point of view as a systems engineer/architect, my usual interactions with Gartner involve exchanges with management similar to the following -- "Vendor W's Product X is the leader in Technology Space Y -- look, they're in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We're pleased to announce that we're all in on Product X." This cycle repeats every year or so, with last year's Product X replaced with Product Z, who's in the Magic Quadrant this year.
Having done this a million times at many different companies, it's easy to be cynical about Gartner. It's quite obvious that vendors pay for their reviews, and management loves the Magic Quadrant because it removes any blame from them when it comes time to do a lessons learned. It's the modern equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." But -- this report is actually pretty accurate. In the systems management space, we're getting a lot of magic tools that have the "AI" stamp on them, or some lesser equivalent like machine learning. Even if it's the equivalent of IFTTT when applied to real world systems ("system is down, so send an alert while we try to perform the recovery steps in the runbook") it's being called AI.
It's just the bubble coming to the top -- social media, apps, etc. are also at the top of the hype cycle.
Executives fund things that have the right buzzwords. Right now it's AI. Before that, IoT. I remember engines getting funded because they were called "Fuel Cells". It's been going on forever.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Amazon for example with Alexa, not that it isn't an interesting product but it doesn't have even pretend intelligence just a bunch of pre-programmed commands. And Apple with Siri. Yes that's great that the programmer has included a question that asks exactly about the need for an umbrella but that doesn't look even a little bit like intelligence until I can come up with my own related questions that it'll interpret. And... pretty much every other company claiming AI, now that I come to think about it.
The reason this problem exists is because of shoddy tech journalists, who will gladly promote ridiculously wild claims as truths without a scintilla of investigation. When the true fraudsters are so much attention, it forces the more legitimate players who operate on the outskirts of the AI world to start putting their toes in the water.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I wish I could be surprised. Yet another tech-of-the-day that people will embellish that the do in return for some quick pocket lining. I'm sure, at most, people are claiming their "supervised math model" or "that one algorithm" someone wrote with a bit of data massage as input is now re-branded in the marketing room as AI.
Honestly, how can I blame the moral compass-less entrepreneurs and suit-genius of washed exploitation? I guess if you're going to get a flocking and get some quick money, I guess why not.
This entire post brought to you by the number $0.00 and the letters J-E-A-L-O-U-S.
I have a program that accepts the price of a meal, and uses sophisticated artificial intelligence to calculate the tip!
I have another one that will accept a phone number, and use artificial intelligence to facilitate real time voice chat with another person!
The best one is the AI that will make the phone hold down paper if I put the phone on top of it!
It really is amazing.
I was at home depot over lunch just today and saw Honeywell thermostats that said "Uses Artificial Intelligence to manage your home comfort!" on the packaging.
*facepalm*
if (condition1) // AI!
do_action1();
else if (condition2)
do_action2();
I have yet to see AI. No one has made it yet.
VI like Mass Effect, sure.
Watson was the closest I ever saw.
Its pretty hard to have a product with an AI in it. Maybe they mean SI (Simulated Intelligence)?
if(A) then {
B
} else {
C
}
Look, ma! I done used artificial intelligence!
Elon Musk and friends have nothing to worry about. AI will be killed off again by companies over-hyping something that's not quite there yet, thus cutting funding before the AGIs become self aware. We'll be saved just in time!
Do you really think something like Siri needs an AI to work?
It needs some clever prerecorded questions and answers and some fuzzy matching for the questions. And then it works better than an AI, as its clear what features siri can provide and what it cannot. So Some program optimized works out of the box, while some AI optimizing itself needs a long time to reach 90% of this. Of course, the AI can work and its hyped now, but most products do not need an AI.
Forrester's latest report says that they aren't. Not even a little bit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
More than 1,000 vendors say their products employ AI, but many are "applying the AI label a little too indiscriminately,"
/me updates resume - Acrimonious "AI" Howard
So-called 'AI' is media hype and VC bait and has NOTHING to do with actual Artificial Intelligence. This is just the nail in the coffin.
If it exists, then it's not AI.
If it doesn't exist, it's vaporware and thus not AI.
Consumers don't know what AI even is, so it's not deceptive to use a term that is completely meaningless to them.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The AI community has been spewing out mostly hype and preposterous forecasts for almost 60 years now. Sure, we have Watson and the Go champ, but translations remain only marginally useful, and chatbots seem to become, if anything, more pathetic with every passing year. As an academic discipline, AI remains tainted, and all this hype is only going to make things worse, in this respect, once it becomes clear that it can not live up (as usual) to expectations.
Customers don't want driverless cars either. If you're one of the young drones that works for these companies, please stop feeding the beast. Your "enthusiasm for tech" is making the wrong people powerful.
The companies that push green and AI past the point of sanity are usually publicly-traded companies bought out with the help of central bankers and proxies. They are pushing a political doctrine and will cannibalize their sales to do it unless the central bankers keep laundering more money into it like Carlos Slim and the NY Times. Avoid doing business with them at all costs.
Companies trying to sell me products take excessive liberties on describing the capabilities of their products? Marketing people stretch the truth to support their narrative? Thank God we have Gartner and its Hype Cycle and Magic Quadrants, or I never would have been able to figure it out on my own!
Basic statistics are now considered "AI": http://www.iflscience.com/tech...
Something similar has happened with "algorithm", as it seems to appear whenever Facebook, Google etc. are doing something sinister with your data. I guess elementary school was being super evil when I was taught long division.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Seriously. People this smart can't be this dumb. Also, even the most advanced 'AI' is still just a *form* of automation. Hype, hype, hype.
It's making it quite obvious what products/companies are full of shit and best to avoid. So thanks for that I guess!
Twinstiq, game news
AI Inside
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
This reminds of when I once bought an external USB card reader with "automatic cable management", which is what I was after. In the box on the side was the cheapest and nastiest plastic spool I've even seen.
This news site just showed up out of the blue one day. Does anyone know what they're about, exactly?
People seem to forget that AI has been around for decades. It's just that when people used to say "AI", it meant "i wrote a fancy script that makes these digital dudes walk around", and now AI seems to mean some sort or self-learning "neural network" program.
All told, it really depends on what you define as AI.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
An example the article is quick to follow...
Requiem for the American Dream
Have you seen what passes for AI in most games? It's pathetic.
Tell me you haven't seen this. An NPC character gets caught at the top or bottom of stairs and is unable to use the stairs. They get caught under them, or stuck on a railing, or seem unable to decide to use them.
Or this. A game piece or character comes under attack. Though fully equipped for battle, both offensively and defensively, the game piece just stands there like a moron, taking damage. They don't even attempt to take cover! Unless you intervene they will die without having lifted a finger. All the resources poured into them will be lost.
Or this. A game character starts cycling back and forth in some repetitious activity. They aren't accomplishing anything and often would be farther ahead just standing still. It's like they have OCD or something and have to touch every stone in the walkway exactly 100 times...
Yes, many AI controlled game characters aren't quite that bad any more. However even the peak of AI accomplishment in very modern games is pretty bad.