These days in tech, everything has to be A.I. Whatever that means.
When a term doesn’t really mean anything, you can literally make it mean anything.
At the level of the huge tech corporations, A.I. really means LLMs, which are essentially just massive prediction machines. They definitely can’t “think,” but the way they work is not entirely understood even by the people who built them, and is not understood at all by the average person, so their responses to our prompts land somewhere in our perception between “magic” and “human-like consciousness.” In reality they’re neither, but it doesn’t matter, as long as they promise massive profits at some point in the future… even if they require tremendous input of money and energy resources in the meantime.
And then at a lower level, companies that definitely do not have the resources of Google or Meta are nonetheless suddenly offering “A.I.” in just about everything they do.
But those of us who have been around tech as long as I have remember the early 2000s, when “wizards” started appearing everywhere. Wizards were really nothing more than step-by-step scripts with some simple branching logic. But they were dressed up with friendly on-screen text and whimsical designs in ways that gave the impression that the computer was interacting with you on almost human terms.
It’s clear today that all of this low-budget “A.I.” is really just wizards by another name, which, again, are just simple scripts with branching logic, by another name.
Nothing in this industry is real.
Below is a composite screenshot of the “conversation” I had with the so-called “AI Troubleshooter” from a hosting company that shall remain nameless. (Let’s just say… it’s more than a hosting company, but it’s not the “hostingest” company.)
It’s clear to me that there is not really anything more to this than a script that fires off when a 500 error gets logged. The script parses the log error, scans the site for common, well-known configuration issues, and applies standard corrections and/or resets the configurations to their defaults, then checks again for errors. The script is dressed up in exactly the same kind of “friendly,” quasi-human language of those classic “wizard” scripts from before “A.I.” became the buzzword du jour.
I’d insert the eyeroll emoji here except I have WordPress emoji disabled on this site, courtesy of my No Nonsense plugin. Oh God, I just did self-promotion. But I promise No Nonsense includes absolutely zero A.I. B.S.
