"Welcome to the artificial intelligence bullshit-industrial complex."

Mike Mallazzo, The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I., Medium, June 12, 2019:

The core feature of a B.S.-industrial complex is that every member of the ecosystem knows about the charade, but is incentivized to keep shoveling. It’s not so much that we reach a point where we convince ourselves our bullshit is true; it’s that the difference between truth and bullshit has become purely semantic. The definition of something, like artificial intelligence, becomes so jumbled that any application of the term becomes defensible.

Let’s break down the key components:

The marketers know it’s bullshit. At some point, it probably began innocently enough: A clever product marketer, looking to differentiate a technology that three of his competitors were also hawking, likely started out by declaring that his email capture tool was powered by dragon’s tears. When that failed, he said it was powered by artificial intelligence. The next week, customer relationship management solutions became A.I., then sales outreach platforms and eventually… bodegas. Then it became a demand-side problem. Requests for proposal began to ask how technology vendors “leverage A.I.” while investors began to inquire around how incorporating artificial intelligence at scale would reduce churn.