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> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence What a time to be alive

picsao 4mo ago
[dead]
kjkjadksj 4mo ago
Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.
- KennyBlanken 4mo 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 4mo ago
    I guess the appliance industry has dibs on the name AI anyway.
- Sharlin 4mo 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.
  - croon 4mo ago
    Every AI generation has been useful. No AI generation has been AI, including this one.
- shermantanktop 4mo 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.
  - beering 4mo ago
    This is not true because many older AI disciplines were not machine learning. A lot of work was put into tree search, logic programming, etc that we don’t count as ML. Older NLP work had little or no machine learning either.
robotswantdata 4mo ago
BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.
baxtr 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.
  - baxtr 4mo ago
    Fair point. Reminds me of the Warren Buffet quote: If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.
harrall 4mo 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.
- Izkata 4mo 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 4mo ago
    Because the trend started with the iMac.
    - SoftTalker 4mo 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.
- etempleton 4mo 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.
- snickerbockers 4mo ago
  E-something was the big trend before i-something and we still have ebay and email (although only the former is a brand name).
Sharlin 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.
    - Sharlin 4mo 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.
prpl 4mo 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.
vrighter 4mo ago
reminds me of the long blockchain corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.

picsao 4mo ago

[dead]

kjkjadksj 4mo ago

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

KennyBlanken 4mo 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 4mo ago
  I guess the appliance industry has dibs on the name AI anyway.
Sharlin 4mo 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.
- croon 4mo ago
  Every AI generation has been useful. No AI generation has been AI, including this one.
shermantanktop 4mo 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.
- beering 4mo ago
  This is not true because many older AI disciplines were not machine learning. A lot of work was put into tree search, logic programming, etc that we don’t count as ML. Older NLP work had little or no machine learning either.

robotswantdata 4mo ago

BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.

baxtr 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.
- baxtr 4mo ago
  Fair point. Reminds me of the Warren Buffet quote: If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.

harrall 4mo 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.

Izkata 4mo 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 4mo ago
  Because the trend started with the iMac.
  - SoftTalker 4mo 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.
etempleton 4mo 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.
snickerbockers 4mo ago
E-something was the big trend before i-something and we still have ebay and email (although only the former is a brand name).

Sharlin 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.
  - Sharlin 4mo 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.

prpl 4mo 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.

vrighter 4mo ago

reminds me of the long blockchain corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.