I usually keep my tech rants to myself. Some of those rants end up being stuff I say during afterparties at tech launches. This is one I’ve been wanting to say ever since ChatGPT took off and became a household name.
I’m Sick of Hearing the word “AI”.
Before the ardent supporters put out their pitch forks and rant in the comments, I am NOT saying that AI or Artificial Intelligence is 100% a bad thing. In fact, I’ve been using devices and software that utilize AI for basically a decade! What I’m really sick of? Hearing the word “AI” sprinkled into almost every new gadget or service under the sun.
How Did We Get Here?
If you have been paying attention to the tech space for a while, then you know that artificial intelligence itself isn’t new. Even going back a decade ago, you would see smartphones use some form of AI. This was very prevalent when smartphone cameras focused on “computational photography” and used “machine learning” to make that happen.
The difference between then and now is that one piece of software made the term “AI” mainstream:
ChatGPT
Here’s the thing: the concept of a chatbot isn’t new. What made ChatGPT work was its use of a large language model (LLM for short). Using LLMs made the responses from ChatGPT seem more natural than previous attempts. (That doesn’t mean it’s 100% natural though.)
Every other tech company was caught off-guard when OpenAI released ChatGPT into the world. They have been trying to catch up with their own spin on what we now know as “generative AI”.
When ChatGPT came out in late 2022 and became as popular as it did, it was exciting! This was a big example on how artificial intelligence could make an impact beyond the tech industry. 2023 would see how other tech companies would react initially, but 2024 started something I did NOT wanna see.
Putting “AI” in Everything
In 2024, we saw a lot of tech companies use the term “AI” in basically every single thing they put out. This is basically the year where I started to sour on the whole AI thing. Most of the phone makers mostly use it to show off many generative AI features that are tailored to text and images. Those are mostly fine for me, even if I don’t really use it that much. Where I find the use of the “AI” term really offensive is in the naming of hardware products such as:
I’m honestly not sure what some companies are thinking putting “AI” on products that pretty much don’t need it. This trend has been really annoying to see. I have yet to see concrete evidence that AI is the main reason people upgrade to new devices.
Since it’s mainstream now, I don’t see tech companies stop using AI as a selling point for their products and services. I just hope they stop using the term “AI” in their hardware products or overexposing that term even if some features have nothing to do with actual artificial intelligence.