Stop Slapping AI on Everything
Tired of pointless tech hype? Discover why fake buzzwords and AI slop harm real people.
The endless drone of tech hype is infuriating, but it’s hard to know what to ignore. Every week, we hear about new fads that are either going to transform the world or at least the fortunes of some lucky startup. But how do we tell the difference between genuine utility and lazy marketing buzzwords? The best way is to ask whether a product or service has a real-world purpose that solves a problem.
Tech hype often obscures the fundamental challenges that face the economy. Elected officials, civil servants, and university professors have been seduced by technologies that promise sweeping social benefits and economic growth. But these fantasies can distract from efforts to tackle low-quality jobs, income stagnation, and inadequate housing. Self-driving cars, for example, have failed to live up to their promised potential.
Instead of focusing on these big picture issues, some leaders have turned to fake AI to create a sense of urgency and excitement. This approach is essentially the opposite of what technology should be: a tool for people to use to improve their lives and the world around them.
Rather than helping people cope with the challenges of modern life, these products and services simply create friction in order to draw attention and generate sales. One obvious example is the endless flow of quick, AI-generated video clips on social media platforms like TikTok and Reels. These micro-trends are generated by feeding a short written prompt into an AI model, which then produces a series of frames that are edited together into a video. The result is a silly, hypnotic, and occasionally disturbing experience.
"This sort of AI slop doesn’t just look bad; it also smothers the creativity of actual artists. Several popular AI creators I interviewed describe receiving hateful messages from other users accusing them of stealing opportunities from struggling freelancers."
And it has serious ramifications for the economy: A recent Brookings study found that when generative AI tools first hit the market in 2022, the number of freelance contracts in a certain category dropped by about 2% and earnings by 5%.
The best way to counter tech hype is to distinguish between genuine utility and lazy marketing buzzwords. A key way to do this is to focus on what economist Robert Shiller calls “irrational exuberance.” It’s easy for investors to get seduced by stories that emphasize rapid technological change and huge benefits from those changes. Such narratives created the current start-up bubble and have sustained it even as the technologies they promised fail to deliver.
Tech companies and investors need to take a hard look at their own hype cycles. They should stop promoting technologies that can’t be proven at scale, and they should stop trying to sell people fantasies about the future. Instead, they should focus on building robust products that solve real problems in the real world. That’s the only way to avoid getting burned by the next round of pointless tech hype.