'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused
theguardian.com94 points by Brajeshwar 3 hours ago
94 points by Brajeshwar 3 hours 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.
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.
> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence
What a time to be alive
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
Two past co's I know well rebranded themselves as "cloud" a decade ago with a narrow definition
My favourite is Allbirds that pivoted from eco friendly shoes to AI infrastructure. How do you even make that decision?
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.
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.
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.
Branding not used for its intended purpose is about as useful as calling your landscaping company four seasons.
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".
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.
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.
Of course most companies can't effectively surf the wave of an extremely rapidly evolving technology. They all want to look like they are, though.
Do you guys remember when everything tried to become blockchain too? :’)
I'd love to read the mind of an investor that actually falls for this shit. Who actually thinks that Allbirds will see much higher returns because they "have an AI graphics division?"
I like AI, but seriously, who actually invests on this basis? Where is the critical thinking? I don't feel sympathy for any investor that gets rug pulled on this stuff.
Allbirds sold their shoe business and is basically a SPAC that spun up an AI company under the existing publicly traded company. For all intents and purposes it’s just a new AI company.
It’s the latest version of the meme stock craze. Nobody bought Gamespot stock because they thought it was a good long term investment. They bought it because they thought they could quickly double or triple their money and leave someone holding the bag
You think an investor gives a shit past "if they say this, the numbers will go up"? And the numbers mostly go up because everyone has the same mentality.
No one cares about the product any more. And that will be the end of all of this.
Or just investment quotas requiring AI in the portfolio. I suspect it's mostly this. Or getting included in more indices etc.
The more trendy boxes you tick, the broader the universe of people whose box you tick and who can thus invest.
AI graphics division: Putting in 100s of engineering hours to build and internal AI tool to produce AI-slopified marketing in order to save ~2h a month of human work.
The same investor who will buy SpaceX at 250 PE. They are all over the place, hence all the AI washing.
A lot of it is prisoner's dilemma and its variants. As an investor, even if you think a particular AI shift is bullshit, you have to take into account the possibility that other investors won't - and at that point you might miss out on the gains.
This is one of the reasons stock market is so disconnected from reality.
But wouldn’t it be a failure if it’s bullshit and therefore no gains?
A16Z's post on the Slack IPO (https://a16z.com/announcement/slack/) is a good pointer to the kind of thinking here. A pivot from an unprofitable game to laying off 80% of the company to a weird communication app could be fairly described as "bullshit", but when your business model is finding the rare exceptions where the stars align and a company ends up being worth billions, it's not a kind of bullshit you can afford to be entirely unreceptive to.
> Who actually thinks that Allbirds will see much higher returns because they "have an AI graphics division?"
Perhaps the investment is more on the “greater fool” theory. “I think this is complete nonsense, but there’s probably someone not as savvy who will buy into this garbage idea upon which I can profit.”
>I like AI, but seriously, who actually invests on this basis? Where is the critical thinking? I don't feel sympathy for any investor that gets rug pulled on this stuff.
They don't and the people who are falling for this rhetoric are naive. Most investors _should_ invest more in AI companies. And most companies _should_ invest in AI. It is the rational move and it is exactly what we are seeing here. I don't know what the hysteria is about.
This has been pathetic to watch in general and first hand at the companies I've been at lately. Management scrambling to find anything to throw AI to, resulting without exception in embarrassing demos. I'm excited about AI but not this whole circus.
So a company's success today may depend on how clickbaity their business model is.
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.
Funny how few companies are rebranding themselves as Blockchain companies anymore. Tech trends crack me up. Greed is shameless.
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.
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?...”
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.