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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.
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.
or "buzzword chasing". I've seen it many times since the beginning of my career. When relational databases became The Thing in the mid 1980's, every database product made just enough tweeks to call their database "relational", even though the implementation was either questionably relational, and/or done poorly.
When GUI's were The Thing when Windows 3.1 came out, every product tried to shoehorn their app into a GUI. Often they bundled it with the DOS version so that when customers found out the hard way the GUI version was dodgy or immature, they'd install and use the DOS version. Their phone support people echoed, "try installing the DOS version, you may like it better" hundreds of times a day.
I was just reading about the early years of Oracle corporation. They bragged their database ran on a dozen or so computer brands (AKA "cross-platform"). In practice, it didn't work very well on most those listed on the brochure because they didn't bother fixing the platform-specific bugs for low-sales platforms. So, in practice, Oracle really ran on just a handful of computer brands.
Jamming dodgy AI into products to call them "AI based" seems to be the same ol' game.
Table-ized A.I.