There’s a terrific scene in Game of Thrones where ex-Maester Qyburn goes to visit Queen Cersei in prison, after she’s been captured by the Faith Militant for various crimes against their religion. You don’t need to have seen it to understand one of the lines used by Qyburn to explain the fervent religious behaviour; “belief is so often the death of reason”. In this case, the Faith Militant kind-of had a good point, as Cersei had indeed had kids with her brother, one of whom was now the King - but the point has such practical application when it comes to AI that I couldn’t resist picking it up.

Why is it that all of the major platforms are slathering AI over everything? From FAANG, to Notion, to Figma, to Microsoft, to Canva, and beyond - you can’t move without an AI lozenge intruding into your field of vision. I would charitably characterise some of these services as “quite helpful, sometimes”…but they don’t justify the hype or the intrusion. It’s a gold rush, where everyone has to be seen as keeping up, and as a result so many of the implied promises being made aren’t being kept, and we don’t have the choice to remove them.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t useful AI applications, like I’ve said before. ChatGPT can be a helpful intern. It’s just that the hype has become a cacophony, and it almost feels like sacrilege to point out that, in many cases, this hype cannot be justified. Belief in the potential of AI has far outstripped reason, but hey there’s serious money changing hands so please just shush.

There’s a central fact sitting at the heart of all this - that while the quality of output from LLMs and other AI tools seems good on first impression, it rarely withstands close inspection. Eight year olds can tell when text has been written by an AI. I’m reminded of the message from the seminal book about web2.0, The Cluetrain Manifesto: Conversation leads to Relationships, Relationships lead to Transaction. But what if the quality of conversation drops, thanks to AI? Would the quality of relationship follow suit, leading to reduced transaction?

What can we do? At an individual level, we can look after ourselves. Embrace a healthy degree of scepticism when it comes to anything related to AI, and don’t get caught up in the hype cycle. If that specific application of AI turns out to be as good as promised, then that’s fine - you’ve lost nothing from this exercise. Read excellent blog posts like this one to help keep your guard up. And remember, no-one can force you to believe that their product is great. Form your own opinion. Let reason prevail!