The hype cycle for AI features means that people working on digital products get “add AI” pushed into their KPIs and metrics. So there’s an incentive to find ways to slap the company’s AI branding onto features that aren’t really AI, they’re just normal code.
Stuff I’ve seen called AI:
- linters, which are like spellchecking for technical text (usually code languages)
- wizards, which are little interfaces or forms that step you through a decision tree
- most recent/popular items being pushed forward in the UI
- maths. Standard math being done for you, like in Excel.
I mean, it’s code, and it’s giving the user suggestions. But if you’re going to call that AI then you might as well call my old high school TI-90 calculator AI.
I already dislike the way that venture capitalists have grabbed the term “Artificial Intelligence” and applied it to LLMs and image detection/generation programs. But that might just be me, a sci-fi fan who’s read and watched so many stories about what artificial intelligence could be (for better or worse) to think that fancy autocomplete or very fast probability calculators are actually intelligent.
But even by the venture capitalists degraded definition of AI, a feature wizard is not AI. I don’t blame the people slapping the label on to whatever they can, we’ve all got to survive in this capitalist hellscape. But it’s just accelerating the hype cycle, and that usually leads to the investment bubble popping instead of deflating.