The “blowing smoke up your ass” theory of AI

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t believe the current AI tools are entirely useless. There probably are some good use cases out there and it’s an overall interesting tech. Having said that, I have some thoughts I want to share with you.

I love technology. I’m not obsessed with it but I do enjoy staying up to date with what’s happening in the tech world. This is both on the hardware and on the software side of things. Sadly, the current state of tech news is quite boring because it’s dominated by AI. AI this, AI that. New AI companies cropping up, old companies pivoting to AI, and companies that have no business being in the AI race announcing their AI strategies. It’s everywhere. And yet, there are PLENTY of examples of how bad this tech can be.

And yet, “people” keep being super optimistic. And when I say people, I mean mostly developers. Because that’s my current theory: the vast majority of the AI hype is driven by tech people who are struggling to realise that AI is most useful in their line of work. Every time people discuss AI the best example they can come up with for how useful these tools are is coding. AI tools are—allegedly—great if you need help coding something and you don’t know how to do it. Which is great, if you’re a developer.

The current state of AI is filled with mostly nonsense. Just look at what the big players are announcing. Google has tried to shove its stupid AI thing inside search results and has failed spectacularly and they’re now slowly retreating. Apple had an entire event dedicated to AI to announce a smarter Siri and some smart—allegedly—writing aid. Cool, I guess? OpenAi is announcing all sorts of tools that are cool tech demos but I can’t see why the population at large should be excited about any of that stuff.

I’m starting to believe that tech companies—and their VC companions—are drinking way too much of their own Kool-Aid because they fail to realise that the vast majority of the usefulness of AI tools can be found in the industries that work on said tools. At least that’s my current theory. But hey, I said it many times before, I’m a complete idiot and I’m happy to be proven wrong. If you have a different theory I want to hear it so get in touch or maybe ask your AI bot to get in touch with me.