The Messaging Skills That Have Blown Up The AI Bubble

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AI is useful. Let me get that out of the way. What we are mostly referring to as AI at the moment (Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Pilot, etc.) can do useful things. The point of there being an AI bubble is not that it isn’t useful — it’s that the massive costs and investments of these LLMs (large language models) go far beyond their use or potential return on investment, especially in the short to medium term. See here, here, here, and here. Going through this series, I started thinking about how certain messaging skills have been a big reason the AI bubble has blown up to the degree that it has.

Personification

The biggest and most obvious one is personification. AI hype agents and those buying the hype like to think of these new tools as human-like brains — hence the name artificial intelligence in the first place. We are told to think of them as developing organisms. There’s even a whole other industry being hyped up around this personification — the humanoid robot industry! The idea is that we’re going to have what are essentially artificial brains that are like human brains (but better) and we should have human-like bodies to put them in. Then those robots will do all the work humans have to do and humans can enjoy the benefits of that.

Personification is a very engaging, fun, imagination capturing tool in the first place. Applying it to robots has been quite popular for several decades. Think of The Jetsons, Robocop, The Terminator, and even Metropolis, a movie form 1927! We love the idea, and generation after generation imagines a world in which humanoid robots are our servants. Like living in outer space, it’s an idea that never gets old and rises to the forefront of entertainment and technologists’ dreams time and time again. This time around, yes, these LLMs mimic humans quite well when it comes to communication. Whether they are ready to take on the role of Rosey the Robot, though, or … do all the things and usher in an age of abundance … well, that is less likely than more likely, but it continues the decades-long dream.

Prophesy of Utopian Future

Speaking of an “Age of Abundance,” this is something I just wrote about a few days ago, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it here. It’s a classic tool, though. Many people are inclined to think we can create a utopia on Earth, that we can make this planet into a paradise. Prophesying a utopian future has been a tactic of hucksters for centuries. And, yes, society has improved in some ways — we have cool things we didn’t have in the past. However, this is no utopia. Many people are struggling to have enough food on the table, don’t have a table or a home in the first place, or are at least stressing day after day about how to pay the bills. Yep, some people have yachts and others at least have “smart homes” with various cool technologies, multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, a clean and modern kitchen. However, hundreds of millions of people live in poverty.

Beyond “things,” by the way, happiness is something else. Having all the wealth in the world doesn’t make one happy. (Look at Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump, etc., etc.) Some of the least happy people I’ve ever met have been super rich. It seems that people who get a ton of wealth but don’t feel content have a way of spiraling, finding problems with everything, and being grumpy almost 24/7.

Anyway, though, back to the matter of improving the amount and quality of things we have, a great book comes to mind — The Tao of Pooh. It’s one of my favorite books, so I highly recommend it. It has clever and funny ways of explaining to us that even as we keep developing and getting technologies that are supposed to cut down our work and make our lives easier, we continue to work more and more, are busier and busier, and stress increasingly year after year. But AI and robots are supposedly going to be different. They are going to eliminate our need to work, and will essentially abolish the use of money at all. I mean, I wouldn’t even go that far in critiquing this industry’s hype, but Elon Musk has gone there repeatedly. The idea that no one is going to need to work because AI and robots will do everything is so absurd that I don’t even know how to tackle this, but — to varying degrees — this is the prophesy of a utopian future tool that has helped blow up the AI bubble.

Magical Black Boxing & Technology Enchantment

I’ve already discussed how “magical thinking” has contributed broadly to the hype around AI. We apparently have a tendency to believe in magic, crazy conspiracy theories, and fantastical stories more than the boring straightforward stuff of reality. Communication around AI leans into this heavily. AI is like a magical black box — it gobbles up all the information in the world and then can become superintelligent and almost human through the magic of neural networks and machine learning. Just put it all together and tell the system to learn — voilà! The result is that it might even become conscious. (Sorry, but that idea is nonsense, no matter how many nerds claim otherwise.) A lot of the hype around AI is that it’s doing things on its own, and even the AI engineers don’t know how or why. That is supposed to make use believe it is going to pass up humans in terms of not only ability, but also efficiency, effectiveness, and consciousness.

It reminds me a bit of the hype around the internet in its early days. It was going to solve all manner of societal and economic problems, because of the endless information and widespread ability to share and connect across the globe. But that was much less of a black box “we don’t know how it does it” story.

Performance Puffery

Perhaps this one is getting toned down a bit, but it’s been a huge part of AI’s rise and ongoing hype. There are all kinds of claims about how amazingly good AI is, and we’ve even got people like Elon Musk saying that AI and robots will be able to perform surgeries on their own and we’ll have no need for surgeons or doctors. However, as we’ve learned, AI gets a lot of things wrong (even when it has an authoritative tone, part of that performance puffery), has a tendency toward hallucinations and there’s no solution for that (throw a bunch of crap together, and sometimes what you get out is crap), and really has to constantly be checked. This doesn’t just go for accuracy, but also simply for usefulness. Will I ever be able to say, “hey, AI, go do all the things” while I lay in the hammock and sip on a pina colada? Ha! But that’s basically been the story we’re getting sold alongside claims of AI already doing all kinds of things better than humans. Wake me up when storytime is over.