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Posted by Brajeshwar 5 hours ago

'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused(www.theguardian.com)
135 points | 115 commentspage 3
kylehotchkiss 2 hours ago|
Do you guys remember when everything tried to become blockchain too? :’)
kkotak 1 hour ago|
Don't forget NFT :)
rich_sasha 4 hours ago||
I just hope there's .ai domains for all of them.

A while back we ran out of .com domains and that burst the bubble. Or something like this.

hluska 3 hours ago||
I heard an anecdote from a good friend about the opposite side of this. He manages a pub/restaurant and has a neat story about how this has changed.

At the height of COVID, food photography was very important. Because of distancing requirements and his kids health, he didn’t really have access to hiring photographers and so he invested in a good camera and a tripod, and started to learn to be restaurant’s photographer. Six years later and he’s still the photographer but he’s back to using an iPhone and he’s forgotten a lot about composition because obviously not AI generated has become a differentiator.

halfcat 4 hours ago||
There was a line in one of The Walking Dead TV show spin-offs, something like:

”I've known men who inspire fear. Do you know what they have in common? They never say how frightening they are.”

And here we are.

”I’ve known companies that work on AI. Do you know what they have in common?...”

Rebelgecko 3 hours ago|
The Geto Boys shared a similar sentiment in their song Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta.

A genuine gangster doesn't feel a need to flex their power, because such gauche displays only highlight one's own insecurities and weaknesses

runamuck 2 hours ago||
I learned about that song from "Office Space!"
j45 5 hours ago||
It will be challenging for non-tech people to present themselves as tech.

Especially those who have not implemented software in businesses trying to suddenly boil the ocean with AI.

AI remains a great step forward to help businesses benefit from technology, with more than one competency around the table.

simianwords 4 hours ago||
There's this new misplaced belief that most how of stock market works is by fooling the stock market with short term plays like this rebranding and then cashing out. Its attractive and speaks to the cynic in us.

The article gives three examples

- Allbirds, a shoe company

- A genetics company marketing that it is using AI

- a property tech company using AI to create 3rd landscapes

The Allbirds one is just financial re-engineering. The others are reasonable?

miyoji 3 hours ago||
Oh, come on. The specific use that the genetics company is marketing is "AI blood tests", which is obviously crap and also works to remind the reader of Theranos, which I'm sure is why you didn't mention that.

In the same paragraph as the genetics company, they also mention an "AI-powered basketball hoop" and "AI-powered lasers that – somehow – protect women from predators on crowded underground platforms." Very reasonable stuff that you forgot to mention.

SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago||
What the source article says is that it's a "property company" generating a "floor plan". The PR account director quoted is skeptical that their tool to do this actually is AI in a meaningful sense, but he feels that he must advertise it as AI anyway because everyone's doing it.

This is important not just for cynical reasons, but to calibrate exactly what it means when we look around and see that "everyone" is using AI these days.

simianwords 4 hours ago|
I think a lot of people are secretly wishing for AI to be like the crypto grift but are in for a rude shock when it is definitely not going to end up like that. We will see more and more companies become AI driven and produce AI products.

To think otherwise is naive.

amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago||
No doubt we will see more companies. Will they be able to actually make enough profit to justify their valuations? That remains to be seen.
simianwords 4 hours ago||
Its part of the process - some will live and some will not. But larger parts of the economy are going to be AI weighted and it will only keep increasing.
surgical_fire 13 minutes ago|||
Well, we saw more and more shitcoins and companies releasing NFTs too.

That's how the hype cycle works.

SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago|||
We will see more and more companies become genuinely AI driven and produce products which are actually AI. We'll also see a boom and bust cycle in companies which put an AI label on things which are not AI in any meaningful sense, and companies which build up beyond any plausible value estimate because investors desperately want anything they can call "early stage AI" in their portfolios.
watwut 3 hours ago||
I mean, frankly, no one really gets hurt by starting to use the technology only once it is in its well tested phase and known. The situations where you need to be early adopter are quite rare.

All those threats of "maximize token spend or else something unspecified horrible happens to you in the future" are super weird.