Dispelling the Misleading Marketing of Gen AI

Is the rise of AI inevitable?

First, it's important to note that "AI" is a largely marketing term. Actual artificial intelligence is far beyond our reach at this point. That being said, it's also important to make the distinction between two types of "AI" being widely used today. Traditional, or discriminative, AI is very useful for analytical and predictive tasks. It's been used for decades in medicine, security, science, and technology. When you hear about AI being used to detect diseases or protect the rainforest (two examples that come up a lot in the current AI discussion), it's discriminative AI that's being used. Discriminative AI essentially recognizes patterns and predicts the next step. It involves more human oversight, and it uses less data, than generative AI. Generative AI, or gen AI, is the kind that's being aggressively marketed right now. It's used to "create" things. This is the kind of AI that people "speak" with through large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and generate images, videos, and songs with.

This distinction is not typically made obvious in the public AI discourse, and some of the major corporations selling gen AI even try to equate the two. For example, if you turn off AI features in Gmail because you don't want Gemini summarizing or writing your emails for you, it automatically turns off the spam detection feature, as well. Voice assistants in smartphones are now also being replaced with gen AI assistants. These tactics are misleading. They're meant to make you believe that AI has always been useful to you and that these annoying features are just the next step in its advancement, which is not true, and that if you take an anti-AI stance you must be against all AI, when what most people mean is that they're against gen AI.

Despite companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta pushing the slogan that AI is the future, I would argue that it's really not. It's existed in some form or another for a long time, and there are always advancements being made in this technology behind-the-scenes, but there's no evidence that the generative AI being shoved down our throats is better for society than anything that existed before. Advancements need to come with societal benefits, and there are none here, only harms like theft and plagiarism, deep fakes, AI psychosis and cognitive atrophy, and the negative environmental impacts of the AI data centers being built across the United States. People who use AI to generate fake art, books, music, marketing, and messages have their knowledge, expertise, and credibility questioned. CEOs who laid off workers in favor of AI are now realizing that AI costs more. No one likes talking to customer service chat bots. Gen AI has been removing the humanity from things that used to bring connection and community, and people crave a human touch.

I would also like to dispel the rumor that all these huge AI data centers are being built because the cloud is running out of space. That's just not possible. We are generating more and more data every year, but the data centers that existed to hold the cloud were never close to capacity and most likely wouldn't have ever been because data storage technology is always getting larger in capacity and smaller in physical space to keep up with all the data we generate and save space. Also, most cloud storage is used by companies that have their data deleted after a certain number of years, so space is always opening up.

So, is the rise of AI inevitable? No. It's always been around, and it will continue to be used, but it's not this great technological advancement that's going to take over the world. You don't need to conform and learn how to use it or get left behind (that is such creepy doomsday-like messaging). If true artificial intelligence is ever achieved, that would be a different conversation, but for now, AI in general is useful, but gen AI in the hands of the general public isn't even a useful tool. It's a toy that people are very quickly tiring of, despite all the misleading marketing.