Many Firms Are 'AI Washing' Claims of Intelligent Products (axios.com) 93
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.
BEEP BOOP FUCK THE LOYALISTS (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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?
You have to perform the test in a scientific fashion.
In the original Turing test, a human converses freely with a machine for an arbitrary period of time (days? months?) .
The human has no idea who or what they are conversing with.
Afterword, a panel of experts reviews the recordings of the conversation and tries to determine which was the human and which was the machine.
This repeats many (dozens? hundreds?) of times.
If a statistically significant number of judges guess right, then the machine has faile
As the maker of AI toilet paper (Score:2)
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.
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We don't have a website, we do everything via twitter, so that your only option is to generate attention for us. Thanks!
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If you don't stop with your misleading marketing, you'll cannibalize sales of your nano-tech TP.
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does it roll on the wall or far from the wall?
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I don't even know the name of it, but I used to work in a place where it was neither. The axis was - get this - normal to the wall. For any DeVry grads, that means "sticking out".
I know, I lead a crazy life. The odds will catch up with me one day.
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I've seen such a thing as well. But there are still two possible directions. But possibly then one really makes much less sense. But you know people will always try to do the wrong thing.
And history repeats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: And history repeats... (Score:1)
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https://www.treff3000.de/ [treff3000.de]
https://www.blume3000.ch/ [blume3000.ch]
https://www.bet3000.com/ [bet3000.com]
AI Winter 2.0 (Score:1)
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!
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Only themselves to blame (Score:2)
And the reason they are doing so is to get in on the PHB-loved, Gartner "Magic Quadrant" scam game.
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Fuck. Had to look it up. Seems that's an actual thing.
Seems to be a lot of fluff. A second-rate pastiche on BCG's matrix thingummahicky.
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I remember when it was just called... (Score:1)
Lying.
Re:I remember when it was just called... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I remember when it was just called... (Score:5)
Companies don't "lie". They engage in "marketing".
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Companies don't "lie". They engage in "marketing".
And that reflects the large amounts of cashish being thrown at AI. That's just human nature or business nature.
The underlying and more scary socioeconomics should be considered - competing AI in business. It was one thing when people competed against people, but machine against machine is far more serious even if people are not directly in harm's way. The problem is that machines, smart or not, are still pretty competent at brute force. A machine that is losing knows only to search longer and overturn more
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Intelligence? (Score:1)
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I don't think he can yet pass the Turing test, so I'm not sure that counts as true AI.
We enter a new era of AI products scam! (Score:2)
About to see it on a Tide soap box just beside HE tag!
No AI (Score:1)
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.
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I would tend to agree. Transistor size and density is reaching the point where the quantum tunneling effect kicks in and breaks transistors. In a nutshell, Moore's law is about over as we will not be able to continue to put more transistors in smaller packages.
Some new form of computing may be invented that lets it continue but I don't think we will get anywhere near the abilities of a human brain.
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the problem with making AI is that we don't know precisely what we need to simulate, or exactly how much of it to get something that looks intelligent.
Simulating brunettes would get the job done.
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Why? What is it about your brain that you believe makes it so special that it cannot be duplicated by artificial* means?
* I guess in vitro fertilization is close enough to natural for your definition.
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And neither does anyone else.
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Unfortunately, I have to say, "go for it!". Because you are competing in the marketplace with exaggerators, if you want the prizes, you have to play the game. Don't outright lie, just take advantage of fuzzy definitions.
For example, I can claim I once did "AI programming" because I made script that did something similar to sorting in-coming email messages to auto-distribute them to the proper department. It parse
Deluting AI (Score:3)
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.
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Exactly. People (read here 'shitty tech journalism') mix AI and Automation.
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AI won't be taking jobs soon, but automation will. It does't take AI or machine learning to replace the majority of any office work. In my department there are about 1000 people. Most of them are just reading from one screen some data to pass off to another person will copy and paste to the next. With some intelligent scripts automating things I could reduce the department size down to 50 people. My boss usually tells me not to say these things out loud.
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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.
So all those truck- and cabdriver jobs are safe for a long time to come, then?
Something I agree with from Gartner?? (Score:3)
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.
Buzzwords Get Funding (Score:2)
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Totally true. We have our office at a co-working space and I recently overheard this exchange between three startup founders:
"We didn't get the deal, I think we need to add more AI into our presentation"
After about three weeks I see the three man team celebrating and ask what's up. They were funded. Their app is a vague social-thing with under 500 users.
Don't Blame the Startups/Companies (Score:2)
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It's i red cunt hairs.
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I was recently involved in a project that did not use AI, despite other similar projects by other companies using AI. Anyway, it was all very exciting, and innovative and the company roped in its press contacts to shout our new product from the rooftops and we, the project team & the company, were VERY clear with the press when we were asked about our use of AI. We explicitly said "This system doesn't use any form of AI". Many times. I seriously canno
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It's all AI (Score:2)
if(A) then {
B
} else {
C
}
Look, ma! I done used artificial intelligence!
Woosh (Score:2)
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 (Score:3)
Forrester's latest report says that they aren't. Not even a little bit.
updates resume (Score:2)
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
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I will introduce "typos" to my resume: "AI ded users with em AI l configuration"
Just supports what I've said all along (Score:2)
Many Commenters Are 'AI Washing' Claims (Score:3)
If it exists, then it's not AI.
If it doesn't exist, it's vaporware and thus not AI.
It does not matter (Score:2)
Consumers don't know what AI even is, so it's not deceptive to use a term that is completely meaningless to them.
Poor AI community (Score:2)
Case in point (Score:3)
Basic statistics are now considered "AI": http://www.iflscience.com/tech... [iflscience.com]
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.
Yes we know (Score:2)
It's making it quite obvious what products/companies are full of shit and best to avoid. So thanks for that I guess!
Obligatory CommitStrip (Score:3)
Automatic cord management (Score:2)
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.
There's been AI in games for years... (Score:2)
All told, it really depends on what you define as AI.
W00t! (Score:1)
An example the article is quick to follow...