"AI washing" threatens to overinflate expectations for the technology – Axios

Zealous marketing departments, capital-hungry startup founders and overeager reporters are casting the futuristic sheen of artificial intelligence over many products that are actually driven by simple statistics or hidden people.

Why it matters: This "AI washing" threatens to overinflate expectations for the technology, undermining public trust and potentially setting up the booming field for a backlash.

The big picture: The tech industry has always been infatuated with the buzzword du jour. Before AI landed in this role, it belonged to "big data."Before that, everyone was "in the cloud" or "mobile first." Even earlier, it was "Web 2.0" and "social software."

Plenty of companies rely on one or the other of those tactics, which straddle the line between attractive branding and misdirection.

"It's really tempting if you're a CEO of a tech startup to AI-wash because you know you're going to get funding," says Brandon Purcell, a principal analyst at Forrester.

The tech sector's fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude plays into the problem.

The confusion and deception get an assist from the fuzzy definition of AI. It covers everything from state-of-the-art deep learning, which powers most autonomous cars, to 1970s-era "expert systems" that are essentially huge sets of human-coded rules.

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"AI washing" threatens to overinflate expectations for the technology - Axios