The term AI has been rebranded multiple times, but the latest usage is definitely a marketing term used to boost investor sentiment.
Investors are falling for it too. It’s funny because I think they were finally coming to realize the broken promises of untold wealth to be gained via tech’s early offerings, and starting to realize that their business model is pretty limited (surveillance capitalism with the end goal of ad tech… Which is why Google is willing to end the open web to stop adblockers), and then conveniently “GenAI” is elevated to prominence as what we call “AI” and everyone loses their minds again with fantasy instead of asking how this thing could possibly make any money.
Will I get the free version of this thing to reword “fuck you” in a passive aggressive, more corporate friendly way so I can send off an email to the company? Sure. Will I subscribe to a service that provides that capability? Fuck no.
I do have to say though that I think a lot of programmers appear to have a type of writer’s block that I just don’t understand, and perhaps the only money generating method for these things other than continuing to push ads may be their purchase as corporate tools. I think the integrations, though faddy and obvious, will be the first things to sail out the door when someone gets the bill, because the APIs often bill via token and these piles of garbage require quite a bit of token to be exchanged to come to any kind of satisfactory result.
EDIT: I wanted to add two things:
I think it’s funny that you used the “sound and fury” quote in regards to an article written about ChatGPT because that’s largely what I think ChatGPT is…
I find it hilarious that the first, obvious money making application of ChatGPT is to generate junky bullshit websites that undermine the ad-tech business models of the major tech companies…which is a thing we’re already seeing.