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People keep calling every basic chatbot an AI breakthrough now | AI Innovations - Vivisector

People keep calling every basic chatbot an AI breakthrough now

I was on a call with a vendor last week and they said their new customer service bot was a "quantum leap in AI." I asked a few questions and it turned out they just glued a decision tree onto a keyword search tool. Ive been following AI since the early 2010s when things like GPT-2 felt like magic coming out of a tiny lab. Now every company slaps "AI" on a script that can barely handle three variations of a question. Why are we letting buzzwords replace actual innovation here? Has the term lost all meaning or is it just me?

3 comments

3 Comments

hannah_wells2mo ago

Didn't I used to roll my eyes at people saying the term was overused, but honestly after that vendor call I totally get where youre coming from now. It's like every company just rebrands their old automation scripts and calls it groundbreaking AI to get people excited. They're watering down what used to mean something real so now I don't trust any claim until I see it actually handle a tricky question.

shanec612mo ago

Yeah that call with the vendor really opened my eyes too. I was reading a piece the other day from someone who actually builds these systems and they said most of what gets called AI now is just if/then logic with a nicer UI slapped on it. @fiona_kim97 makes a good point about stuff like Midjourney being legit, but I feel like those real breakthroughs are getting drowned out by all the noise. It's like when every single app started calling itself "social" back in the day, just a buzzword that lost its teeth.

fiona_kim972mo ago

Hold up though, I actually think the term still has some weight if you know where to look. Sure, a lot of companies are throwing "AI" on basic decision trees, but that doesn't mean real breakthroughs aren't happening. You just have to dig past the marketing fluff. Take something like Midjourney or the newer voice cloning tools. Those are legit leaps that would have sounded like sci-fi a few years ago. The problem is more about lazy marketing jumping on the hype train, not the term itself losing meaning.