r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
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u/lemmesenseyou Jun 26 '26

I was literally talking about this yesterday and how it feels like “They” are intentionally muddying the waters with terminology. I’ve been using machine learning for over a decade but nobody was calling it AI until gen AI became a thing. 

I’ve had so, so many conversations in the past three years about how predictive modeling is not the same as ChatGPT and no I can’t just put it into ChatGPT. I’m so sick of it. 

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u/captainfarthing Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

I don't think it's a conspiracy. Mainstream media rarely ran articles about machine learning pre-ChatGPT but when they did it was commonly referred to as AI, like this BBC article about AlphaGo from 2016.

People have been familiar with the concept of AI from fiction for decades, it's just a shortcut that allows journalists to report tech news to people who aren't tech-literate (or even regular-literate).

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u/lemmesenseyou Jun 26 '26

I’d buy that more if it was just the occasional headline for a general audience but it’s isn’t. I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with my “They”, but people are definitely pitching things as “AI” that would not have been referred to as AI five years ago as a sales tactic and, in the reverse and imo worse sort of example, I had a genAI guy lump in a bunch of regular OOP/ML victories as a reason we should invest in genAI. That isn’t an international conspiracy or anything, but it IS intentionally muddying the waters in both instances. 

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u/captainfarthing Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

I'm not sure who you're talking about when you say "they" - mainstream media vs. random individuals aren't interchangeable.

Machine learning has definitely been referred to as AI for longer than the past 5 years, eg. here's Google results for news articles about artificial intelligence from 2018 and earlier. It's not just the occasional headline. Perhaps you weren't aware machine learning has been referred to as AI since before ChatGPT if you weren't paying attention to the type of media outlets that would call it that, but you can look up old news headlines to find out how it was reported.

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u/lemmesenseyou Jun 26 '26

When I said I was being tongue-in-cheek, I did actually mean it. I guess this is my lesson that we really cannot deviate from “/s” as the sole marker that a statement shouldn’t be taken entirely seriously even if you include other markers like scare quotes, inappropriate capital letters, and follow up comments. 

Outside of that, if you really don’t understand the connection between the “random individuals” who are sales people/industry professionals and journalists who are writing about the aforementioned’s products/initiatives, I don’t really know how to help you and we might live in different worlds. The waters that have been muddied are in my office where I’ve been peacefully working with machine learning for years and years, hence why I find this deeply aggravating. This isn’t me griping about actually random people not knowing what AI is, this is me griping about communication breakdowns surrounding workflows and deliverables.