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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.
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.
Companies don't "lie". They engage in "marketing".