> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence

What a time to be alive

To be fair, that’s not exactly a new thing, it’s just sensitive to the exact phase of the Great AI Freeze/Thaw Cycle. A lot of now-ordinary automation used to be "AI" until it become commonplace and no longer buzzword-worthy and thus no longer regarded as "AI", and/or an AI winter hit.

Last time that AI was big before DL it was the "big data" fad and everything had to be big data. Marketing has never not been about how to disguise "what we already do" as the newest buzzword that customers (or investors) want to hear.

The same goes, of course, for all the non-AI fads like "the cloud" or "NoSQL".

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hn_throwaway_99 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I understand why companies try to brand themselves as the latest and greatest tech innovation. What I don't understand is why it works or who falls for it. It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI.

I remember in the years before the pandemic that I would joke that all you had to do was "sprinkle in some blockchain" to your VC pitch and your valuation would automatically go up by tens of millions. It seemed dumb to me then and it seems dumb to me now.

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array_key_first an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Well I think most investors are dumb as rocks. I'm not sure most even know what a transformer is, or what LLM stands for.

Same thing with blockchain. I talked to many, many non-tech people who were very excited about blockchain. Most could not explain what, exactly, blockchain is.

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parineum 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI.

The people who are being marketed to with the AI term don't have any idea what that mean and AI, as a marketing term (the only way it's ever been, so far, commercially used) means a lot more than transformers. My dishwasher has "AI" because it has sensors that can detect where the most dishes are.

The marketing term really just means that the product changes it's behavior without user input. A simple "if...then" is AI.

AI has been used as a marketing term for at least a decade now but LLMs are poisoning the brand because they're, largely, implemented in almost exclusively user hostile ways.

	▲	hn_throwaway_99 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> The people who are being marketed to with the AI term don't have any idea what that mean and AI To clarify, I'm mainly talking about B2B-type businesses where the marketing is to investors or other large enterprises. Despite the fact that it's popular and in vogue to think of VCs and business leaders as idiots, most of them actually do understand what AI is and the difference between "modern" AI and basic automation. And even if you're talking about end consumers, I feel like there is a growing backlash against AI and people will think of a business that touts their "AI dishwasher" or whatever as obvious bullshit and see it as a net negative.
	▲	Sharlin 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The continuous/tracking/predictive AF modes of Canon’s EOS (D)SLR cameras were famously called "AI Servo" and "AI Focus", terms coined somewhere in the late 80s I believe. The early implementations were simple dead-reckoning-based control systems, hardly "AI" even by the standards of that time. Slightly ironically, now in the mirrorless era, and AF algorithms actually based on DL subject recognition and complex predictive algorithms, Canon has retired the "AI" label.

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rightbyte 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it is some sort of virtue signaling of being grifters and abusing the system for short term profit etc.

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etempleton 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

VCs, PE and investors in general. Not all, but enough. Watch CNBC or Yahoo News for even 10 minutes—the sheer stupidity and mania around AI right now is frankly terrifying.

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dfxm12 16 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It doesn't make sense though. If a company builds automation and I need a company to build automation for me, that's good to market yourself that way.

If a company says "we build automation using AI", ehh, I'd probably cut out the middleman and use AI myself...

This is different from marketing around the cloud or big data.

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prpl 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oracle is the hilarious version of this -

9i - "internet"

10g - "grid"

11g - "also grid"

12c - "cloud"

26ai - "ai"

various other examples. One really annoying thing is this has also happened in open source projects too - generic things that, sure, help out with AI tasks are now "AI" things.

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baxtr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fun times. Although I find it hard to blame them tbh.

They’re incentived to do so because apparently investors don’t understand the difference.

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a4isms 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Or, investors do understand the difference, but think they're buying low to sell high to "greater fools."

If the market can remain irrational longer than a fundamentals-driven investor can remain solvent, is it irrational to bet on the market remaining irrational?

	▲	etempleton 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have seen both. I have heard some talking on live television about how it is a bubble, but it isn’t popping yet, so keep investing. Everyone seems to just be trying to get theirs while the party is still happening.

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harrall 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Remember when crypto was hot and everything had crypto.

Remember the Internet was first hot and everything was iThis or Active That. iPhone still has i.

Remember… well not, me, I wasn’t alive… when radiation was cool and Radioactive was in.

Everyone always wants to be cool.

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etempleton 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My favorite was block chain. A company I used to work for that was not a tech company, suddenly going on about the block chain. I saw former, non technical colleagues that were still there write long authoritative LinkedIn posts about the advantages of the block chain and it was incredibly cringey because I am not sure what they thought the block chain was, but I am confident they didn’t understand it at all.

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Izkata 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Before the iPhone was the iPod, and before the iPod I had an iRiver mp3 player. There was certainly a trend and only Apple's product survived that one.

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bananaflag 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Because the trend started with the iMac.

	▲	SoftTalker 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		i<Something>.com was very common during the first dot-com boom. "e" prefixes were also common but I think "i" was more prevalent.

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kjkjadksj 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.

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Sharlin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

ML is, obviously, AI. But not all AI is ML.

The reason the term "machine learning" was even invented was because it was one of the AI winters and an euphemism was needed because "AI" was more of a swearword than a buzzword.

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shermantanktop 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI used to be called ML

which used to be called Statistics

which used to be called “math” or maybe “applied science.”

Obviously the underlying tech and research changed along the way… but not as much as it would seem. We’re still doing matrix operations and gradient descent and softmax, all of which has been around for a while.

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KennyBlanken 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"now"? The appliance industry pretty much hit the "label everything AI" button...again...within months of ChatGPT taking off.

Last time around was when "fuzzy logic" came out, I think?

	▲	bee_rider 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I guess the appliance industry has dibs on the name AI anyway.

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robotswantdata 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.

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picsao 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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