AI is an unprecedented marketing movement

The letters “AI” have taken over the marketplace at light speed. A marketing blitzkrieg to convince consumers that artificial intelligence is here now, which helps to dampen skepticism because if it is here, then the time for questioning has surely passed?

Only, is it here? Sure, there are a handful of new companies with these letters in their name or in their slogan. Search engines aren’t just finding things anymore, you get an AI overview, whatever that might be.

How did the market become so open to AI? There is indeed something different about it that we haven’t really seen before. Next to the marketing blitzkrieg, these products do generate some aesthetically pleasing trinkets; photos, virtual girlfriends, a collection of on-off switches for your electronic tasks, helping you come up with suggestions for new things to spend your money on, and doing spreadsheet stuff but faster and with more data. AI is something that the general public could have been willing to accept, and with the aid of these trinkets, they now do.

Fortunately, there is some criticism from intellectual places: Does this manifestation of AI have consciousness or awareness? Quite frankly, I don’t care. My biggest objection to this product is that data mining companies have found the perfect way to collect your data for free, or in some cases, at your expense. Every time this product is used to generate photos, create tailored lists and services, have a relationship with you, or help you with the mental heavy lifting that you willingly outsource, it is learning all about you: That is to say that the company providing this product is learning all about you.

Here's one of those fancy tests we can do. Let’s use Occam’s Razor to determine the following: Is it more likely that we have finally created artificial intelligence or are businesses using aggressive marketing principles to take to drain more of your data directly from the source?

My second biggest objection is that we seem to have entered an age where marketers have decided when real technological milestones have dawned. Is this how we will become aware of teleportation or find out that fusion is pragmatically viable? We will first see those terms in company names and be told the future is here? Surely something as earth-shattering as producing legitimate artificial intelligence would require rigorous scientific and technological vetting, along with input from philosophers (if there are any left)? This AI seems like somebody has rebranded the car as a time machine because it can transport you to the store five minutes into future.

Nobody in the business world wants to be left behind now. Everyone is scrambling to somehow use or associate themselves with this product. If the business can somehow use these massive databanks of both stolen, coerced, and volunteered information to redefine white collar work as formulaic and replaceable with enough templates within the right parameters, then by golly we are going to do that because people are expensive.

This product is an experiment to see if human habits and work processes can be reduced to basic code, essentially a bunch of if and when commands with rules derived from data trends that have been determined through mass data mining, are they still needed? And the sad thing is, given that most white collar work is mind numbing and process oriented, this product could easily be successful. If the workplace was genuinely a place of creativity, healthy debate, a respect for different ways of working, this product would not look so good.

And to be perfectly honest, if I had been artificially created and genuinely had artificial intelligence, I would be offended that there was once a time when the magic of me was abased to a trite mechanism for exploiting and controlling markets.