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Posted by Brajeshwar 4 hours ago

'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused(www.theguardian.com)
123 points | 95 comments
autoexec 1 hour ago|
I hope these companies aren't in for a shock when the younger generation rejects their brands https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g...

If negative perception towards AI grows, either because of negative experiences after having it forced on them, or as people's utility bills skyrocket, or as the environmental impact becomes more apparent, they might find that what appeals to shareholders doesn't impress the people who usually pay for their products.

CobrastanJorji 1 hour ago|
My kid was an excited Duolingo user who immediately cut it off entirely as soon as he heard that they were doing something with AI. That was all it took. He heard "Duolingo's AI now" on some YouTube video, and it was immediately dead to him.

I don't think people understand just how viscerally negative the perception of AI is for the youth.

thunky 9 minutes ago||
> it was immediately dead to him

Can you elaborate on why he has such a negative view of AI? Genuinely curious.

Edit: downvoted already as expected. What a joke of a tech community this site is becoming.

gum_wobble 3 hours ago||
> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence

What a time to be alive

Sharlin 2 hours ago||
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".

hn_throwaway_99 1 hour ago||
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.

parineum 46 minutes ago|||
> 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 16 minutes ago|||
> 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 24 minutes ago|||
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.

rightbyte 26 minutes ago||||
I think it is some sort of virtue signaling of being grifters and abusing the system for short term profit etc.
etempleton 32 minutes ago|||
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.
prpl 36 minutes ago|||
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.

baxtr 2 hours ago|||
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.

a4isms 38 minutes ago||
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 16 minutes ago||
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.
harrall 2 hours ago|||
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.

etempleton 11 minutes ago|||
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.
Izkata 1 hour ago|||
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.
bananaflag 1 hour ago||
Because the trend started with the iMac.
SoftTalker 46 minutes ago||
i<Something>.com was very common during the first dot-com boom. "e" prefixes were also common but I think "i" was more prevalent.
robotswantdata 2 hours ago|||
BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.
kjkjadksj 2 hours ago|||
Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.
Sharlin 2 hours ago|||
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.

shermantanktop 1 hour ago||||
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.

KennyBlanken 2 hours ago|||
"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 2 hours ago||
I guess the appliance industry has dibs on the name AI anyway.
picsao 2 hours ago||
[dead]
cm2187 20 minutes ago||
But it's completely different from companies adding ".com" to their name in the 90s!
_pdp_ 4 minutes ago||
In 2005 there was one particular cyber security company that comes to mind that had AI claims on their front page. It was a perl script.
b3ing 2 hours ago||
2 yrs ago I saw some company raise a million dollars by saying they used AI, when what they did could easily be done with an algorithm. Many things can be algorithms, regex filters, logic or heuristics (spam detection is an example) but nowadays people want the llm to do it first, without even thinking.
jschveibinz 2 minutes ago||
I've been rejecting pitch decks like that for 2 years.
cj 1 hour ago|||
I think this quote is relevant:

> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

In the sense that it doesn’t matter if it’s AI or Algorithms. All that matters is people think it could be AI. If yes, then it is. Doesn’t matter what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

(Not that I love this reality, I don’t advocate for it, but this is how things are)

AlienRobot 28 minutes ago|||
My favorite example is how Google implemented "AI" in their search console, because it just shows how completely worthless "AI" is even when used by a company that should have all the resources in the world and all the expertise to do it right.

One of the sample prompts is "How is my traffic compared to last month?" So if you type all of this text, click send, wait for Google servers to burn a liter of water to calculate a probable answer, what it gives you isn't even the answer, but an option that you can "apply." If you click on "apply," it refresh the page with a filter using the functionality that already existed in the search console. In other words, this entire LLM can't do more than you can already do by clicking on the extremely simplified buttons of the existing UI. How do you do the same thing via the UI? Click "More -> Compare -> Apply". A whole LLM to replace 3 clicks with 2 clicks + typing the prompt.

By the way, just think: if we gave people an LLM in this analytics thing, what is the number 1 question people would ask? The answer is obviously "how do I increase my clicks?" or "how do I become number 1 on Google?" You don't even need to be a product person to figure that out. That's obvious. Just completely obvious. And of course, the Google's chatbot can't answer that. Because they probably realized, instantly, that is going to be a lawsuit if they said "do X to get more clicks" and you did X and you didn't get more clicks.

gedy 1 hour ago||
Lol yes, I was at a real estate company and their "AI tech" was scraping commercial listings and putting in Elastic Search. CEO really thought the query was AI
baking 19 minutes ago||
I seriously thought "AI washing" was going to be scrubbing all references to AI in public-facing documents.
throwoutway 3 hours ago||
Two past co's I know well rebranded themselves as "cloud" a decade ago with a narrow definition
SoftTalker 43 minutes ago|
Spin up a VM at some hosting company... "we're a cloud company now."
mnky9800n 1 hour ago||
I think the worst part of all this is AI managed to make software cool again while also attacking software developers for no reason at all. Instead of claiming that AI will automate everything (like hello what do you think software does?). They could have said this will create millions of new jobs by giving access to tooling that lets you create whatever you want inside of a computer and offer it up to others. I guess people just like being negative about things.
fnimick 1 hour ago|
It's more profitable to eliminate employee costs than make new products. There's a reason layoffs make stock prices soar far more than product announcements.
minraws 1 hour ago|||
Depends on which company you are, if Nvidia announced a layoff US stock market will collapse. If Microsoft did, then they will be lauded.

Layoffs aren't indicators of success or failure, just some theoretical tea leaf reading style signal for future profits of a company. So if a company is already growing unbelievably fast layoffs are a bad sign, if a company is slowing in growth apparently having employees on business units not working out is equally a bad sign.

And for many companies these layoffs are the modern version of Roman public executions with the audience(investors) cheering it on.

mnky9800n 1 hour ago|||
it is somewhat sad that a company already profitable would devote it's time and energy and profits to becoming more profitable instead of doing cool shit. doing cool shit always seems to be a better idea than anything else when one has profit.
firefoxd 31 minutes ago||
Around 2013, yahoo news interviewed one of the executives at my company. You could literally see my team in the background when he said we did "Big Data". I still don't know what it was supposed to mean. Anyway, a $1.1 billion exit followed shortly after.

I'm doing Quantum Crypto AI next.

jamwise 3 hours ago|
My favourite is Allbirds that pivoted from eco friendly shoes to AI infrastructure. How do you even make that decision?
root_axis 3 hours ago||
It's not really a pivot though, is it? As I understand it, the company went bust and sold their branding to a different company that wants to do AI infra.
duttish 2 hours ago|||
What I saw somewhere, don't know if it's true or a rumour, was that it was a wallstreet guy offering them $5M for if he could shift the strategy. So be bought a _lot_ of shares of the very cheap pre-pivot price, paid them $5M for the pivot, sold the shares at the now 600% stock increase. Netted a tidy profit after the $5M.

They didn't trade company fundamentals, they traded the market sentiment.

jknoepfler 2 hours ago||
a.k.a. textbook bubble behavior
dawnerd 2 hours ago||||
Didn’t even sell the branding since that got sold to the same company that buys up all sorts of brands. The ai “pivot” was a blatant last ditch effort to milk some of the stock. It’s nothing more than fraud.
kjkjadksj 2 hours ago||||
Branding not used for its intended purpose is about as useful as calling your landscaping company four seasons.
SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago||
To be clear, everything about Allbirds including the brand name and other IP was sold off. The shoe store will continue operating (unless or perhaps until the new owners choose to shut it down) under the name "Allbirds"; the public company doing AI infra with the stock ticker BIRD will be named "NewBird AI".
jgalt212 1 hour ago|||
why not Aibirds then, it's almost like Allbirds?
bee_rider 2 hours ago|||
They should make an app that can identify any bird. Then they will be able to justify it: we always wanted to live up to our name, the shoes were a side quest.
KennyBlanken 1 hour ago||
We live in an age when a guy who designed overblown mass-market "luxury" handbags and zero tech industry experience ends up in charge of software and hardware UX at the world's most successful mobile and computer hardware company. And be grossly incompetent, but still manage to last nearly a decade.
kkotak 20 minutes ago||
So.... Who's is it then?
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