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Please stop the AI confidence theater
18 days ago
- The author criticizes the excessive hype around AI, labeling it 'AI Confidence Theater' that causes more harm than good.
- Many claimed 'life-changing' AI use cases are actually basic workflows, and true transformative applications are rare.
- This hype distorts reality, hurts innovation, and leads to toxic comparisons where people feel demoralized and behind.
- It complicates hiring, as AI makes people sound competent without real expertise, requiring more rigorous vetting.
- Reasons for the hype include social media rewards for exaggeration, the rapid evolution of AI, and corporate pressure to oversell.
- The author calls for honesty: stop spreading hype, set realistic expectations, and focus on tangible outcomes and continuous learning.
- AI systems require ongoing maintenance and monitoring; their real value comes from sustained effort, not magical promises.
Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things
18 days ago
- AI marketing often overhypes capabilities, presenting AI as a replacement for human experts to drive subscriptions and sales.
- Tools like compilers and spreadsheets augment human expertise rather than replace it; the real value lies in understanding and decision-making, not just output.
- AI companies leverage current investor hype to build capital and dependency, but will eventually need to prove real-world value and financial metrics.
- The ideal future for AI involves complementing and empowering human experts, similar to how game engines enabled skilled developers to realize projects.
- Initiatives like Midjourney Medical exemplify the potential for AI to enhance expert capabilities, though they risk being overshadowed by consumerist marketing.
Jersey Mike's IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become
18 days ago
- Jersey Mike's mentions AI 22 times in its IPO documents, despite being a sandwich shop, not an AI company.
- The company includes an AI risk warning in its investor documents, citing the use of AI technologies, but without specific details.
- Jersey Mike's relies on software and data for franchise operations, but the AI warning appears as boilerplate text.
- The risk of an AI disaster for a sandwich shop is compared to the low probability of a franchise being struck by lightning.
The AI Hype Reckoning Is Upon Us
12 days ago
- The chasm between AI hype and practical reality is reaching a breaking point, with tech companies and press promoting unrealistic expectations.
- Examples like Ford, Microsoft, Facebook, and Uber show AI adoption leading to quality issues, wasted costs, and rehiring of replaced employees.
- AI in newsrooms and other sectors results in factual errors, plagiarism, and increased workloads for human editors to fix problems.
- Studies indicate AI 'efficiency' can cause knowledge decay, erode trust, and increase human workload due to errors and rework.
- Poor management decisions driven by AI hype, without skepticism, lead to bad outcomes, as seen in cybersecurity, banking, and fast-food cases.
- Broader ethical issues include environmental impacts, labor exploitation, mental health effects, and regulatory failures, often ignored by corporate media.
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
3 days ago
- Many organizations are experiencing a collective psychosis around AI, where rational discussions about its effectiveness are impossible.
- AI investments are largely failing, with projects showing 0% success rates in the author's observations, often due to poor implementation or unrealistic expectations.
- Internal and customer-facing chatbots are common but rarely deliver value, with issues like low usage, inaccurate outputs, and lack of proper metrics tracking.
- Expressing skepticism about AI in organizations is dangerous, leading to job loss or marginalization, forcing employees to feign enthusiasm or 'AI-wash' their work.
- AI demos can trigger irrational buying frenzies, even when the technology is not production-ready, exploiting a gap in decision-making.
- Executives often make exaggerated claims about AI productivity due to peer pressure, fear of contract cancellations, and board demands, creating a coordination problem.
- Organizations are prioritizing AI alignment over sensible projects, leading to ineffective spending, gameable metrics, and hindered focus on core business needs.
- Survival strategies include avoiding group discussions on AI, using anonymous polls, involving ground-level staff, and not challenging broad AI claims to maintain influence.
- For personal sanity, limit exposure to AI hype, consider contracting roles, use AI-generated responses when necessary, and seek jobs at smaller, less affected companies.
- The AI mania is seen as a temporary bubble, with long-term dysfunction in leadership likely to persist until organizations collapse or the hype subsides.
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
2 days ago
- AI projects are failing at a high rate, with many companies not seeing the promised productivity gains.
- Executives and employees feel pressured to profess belief in AI, creating a cult-like atmosphere that suppresses dissent.
- AI demos can trigger irrational buying frenzies, overshadowing practical considerations and leading to poor decisions.
- Game theory among executives leads to a coordination problem where honesty about AI failures risks careers, perpetuating the hype.
- Organizations are 'AI-washing' projects, adding unnecessary AI components to meet ideological purity tests, hindering real progress.
- Survival strategies include avoiding group discussions on AI, using anonymous polls, and focusing on ground-level feedback.
- For individuals, navigating the AI mania may involve switching to contracting, limiting exposure to AI news, and seeking jobs at smaller, less affected companies.
The AI hype is a mass psychosis echo chamber of incompetent individuals
19 hours ago
- The author criticizes the AI hype as a mass psychosis, with people mindlessly adopting AI tools without critical thought.
- Many colleagues and friends embraced AI coding tools like Claude, claiming they no longer need to write code, but the author found this troubling and doubted their competence.
- Trying 'vibe coding' with AI was frustrating; the generated code was often convoluted and inefficient, taking more time than manual coding would.
- The author realized AI gives incompetent people a false sense of competency, which explains its popularity, but this leads to deskilling and reduced actual ability.
- Despite the hype, the author believes AI will eventually be seen as just a tool, with genuine innovation re-emerging once the hype dies down.

Hasty Briefsbeta

#ai hype

Please stop the AI confidence theater

Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

Jersey Mike's IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become

The AI Hype Reckoning Is Upon Us

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

The AI hype is a mass psychosis echo chamber of incompetent individuals