AI snake oil is here, and it’s a distraction

Whether you're on Wall Street, at your friends’ backyard barbecue, or even in the grocery store checkout line, chances are you’ve talked about AI at some point in the past few months.

The technology, which exploded in popularity with the launch of OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, is seemingly all anyone can talk about. And businesses across the economic spectrum smell the opportunity to cash in on the hype.

But the chatter about AI, and more specifically generative AI, technology that allows you to enter a prompt into a chatbot like ChatGPT and receive a human-like response is getting ahead of itself, experts say. And that’s distracting from important discussions about the safety of the technology.

“There's a lot of snake oil out there,” said Hal Daumé, who holds a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and a Volpi-Cupal Family Endowed Professorship. “Companies are selling how the technology works rather than what it can actually accomplish.”

Click HERE to read the full article online from Yahoo.