Slashdot Mirror
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.
And the reason they are doing so is to get in on the PHB-loved, Gartner "Magic Quadrant" scam game.
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.
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.
Companies don't "lie". They engage in "marketing".
Hmm...it seems that "AI" is the new "Gluten Free".
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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."
If it exists, then it's not AI.
If it doesn't exist, it's vaporware and thus not AI.
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.
AI Inside
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.