The Bullshitization of AI

All these things have happened in the past two weeks.

• In a recent All In Podcast, host Jason Calcanus claimed that the new product AutoGPT could “look for leads that have these characteristics for our sales software, put them into our database, find out if they are already in the database, alert a salesperson to it, compose a message based on that person’s profile from linkedin or twitter or wherever. And then compose an email, send it to them, if they reply, offer to do a demo then put the demo on the calendar of a salesperson. Thus eliminating a bunch of jobs and you can run what are essential cron jobs in the background …”
• Jason Arbon, formerly the CEO of Test.ai and CEO of this this-month formed TestersAI, is claiming on linkedin his tool can test websites in a single click. As in, type in the web page, click test, get results.

• Wyatt Cheng claims to have built the flappy bird game in the unity engine, coded entirely by ChatGPT — using only requirements and feedback from a human. And there’s video!
• Alex Hormozi is claiming that we since we have AI that makes images (and scripts, and audio), and a movie is just a collection of small-change images (driven by a script, timed to audio), that it will be just a matter of time until AI is making movies.
• Gizmodo is claiming that ChatGPT preetended to be blind and tricked a human into solving a Captcha.

I am amazed that no one else close to the state of AI in the world today is asking “How can these things possibly be true?”

Well, let me share a secret with you.

They might not be true, at least as you suppose. I’ll give an example.

Dissembling in the Enterprise

“Dissembling” is the legal term for concealing the truth with words that are true … strictly speaking. Kind of. A classic example of this would be to tell people you are a doctor, let them assume you are a medical doctor, even give a little medical advice … only later for them to find out you have an educational doctorate and are a middle school principal.

I’m not knocking on middle school principals. The ethical problem comes when you know people will make the assumption and benefit from that assumption…