Ads for AI

I watch a probably unhealthy amount of YouTube.  And since YouTube likes to put fourteen ad breaks in a twenty-minute video, I see lots of ads.  The vast majority of these ads are for things I have no interest in, or no use for, or are just stupid.  So I do my best to ignore them.  I would skip all that I could, but I do try to watch some so the creators get some revenue. 

A month or so ago, it seemed to me like I was seeing a lot of ads for some AI thing or another.  To the point it felt like a third of the ads were for AI.  So I decided to keep track of what I saw in the next 100 ads.  Out of those 100 ads, twenty-six were for random things like furniture stores or whatever.  Nineteen were for cars, while only ten were specifically for AI, although there were seven more for other tech stuff that might have had some AI in them.  It wasn’t a third, but it did seem like that night when I was tracking ads there was a lull in the AI ads.  Because in the weeks after I tracked the ads, it seems like it’s back to a quarter, at least. 

One of the new AI ads I’ve seen, is something I can’t get my head around.  Apparently, there’s now a washer-dryer that’s AI powered, or something.  Why?  The only thing I can think of, is they have sensors in the machine that allow you to basically hit a button and it will wash your clothes until they are clean, and then dry them until they are dry.  Instead of having a standard wash-dry cycle that you hope gets them clean and dries them completely, this washes and dries only as long as necessary.  That makes sense because that can save water/electricity/time.  If they called this IntelliWash, that would be great.  But since everything now has to be AI, they have to call it AI Wash, or whatever.  Now I know that there are some cases where “some type of AI” is just the right tool for the job.  The problem is, 99% of the stories we hear about AI is the “stolen hammer being used to pound in a screw” stories, so why would you want to call your fancy computer algorithm AI?  Can’t we find some other term for the good AI usages?

The other type of AI ads I’ve been noticing lately, have some business person in a meeting or whatever going, “Me no understand me job.  What me do?” And their AI assistant or whatever goes, “You should buy at $47.” And the person parrots back, “Me buy forty-seven.” I don’t know if it’s a devious scheme by the AI companies to try to tell other companies that “Your employees are complete morons who can’t do anything without AI.  You should just have AI do everything.” Because they hope that eventually AI will run everything, and when AI runs everything, those who control the AIs will control everything.  It’s either that or as an AI company, they don’t understand how businesses … business.