The Paid A.I. Hype Guys ⇥ ft.com

Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, Financial Times:

One hint that we might just be stuck in a hype cycle is the proliferation of what you might call “second-order slop” or “slopaganda”: a tidal wave of newsletters and X threads expressing awe at every press release and product announcement to hoover up some of that sweet, sweet advertising cash.

That AI companies are actively patronising and fanning a cottage economy of self-described educators and influencers to bring in new customers suggests the emperor has no clothes (and six fingers).

The (verified) X accounts producing threads of links to bad A.I. products, boosted by dozens of replies from other verified X accounts, are annoying spam, but seem relatively harmless. But the newsletters profiled here are curious.

One is Rowan Cheung’s Rundown AI newsletter, which Cheung bills as the “world’s most read daily AI newsletter”, which is different from the other newsletter in the article, Zain Kahn’s Superhuman AI, the “world’s biggest AI newsletter”. As alluded to by Venkataramakrishnan but not expanded upon, both attract some heavy-hitting sponsors. The Rundown was recently sponsored by Salesforce, HubSpot, Sana, and Writer, while Superhuman’s recent sponsors include companies like HubSpot, Sana, and Writer — no Salesforce.

While Cheung’s newsletter is mostly A.I. boosterism with sponsorships, there is a block near the end of each issue for a sibling product: the Rundown University. The first thing you need to know about it is that it is not a university, obviously. It is online training through individual “courses” offered at $50 apiece with individual lessons on using A.I. tools, some of which — like Gamma and Zapier — happen to have sponsored of the newsletter. Or, if you want access to all the “courses” plus workshops, tutorials, and some kind of group chat, you can get all that for just a penny shy of $1,000 per year. Just above the footer sits a carousel of inspirational quotes about A.I. from people like Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, and Elon Musk. None are actually specific to Rundown “University”, just vibes about the importance of A.I. and its impact. It all feels a bit much.

I am fascinated by the knock-on effects of a hype cycle, and A.I. has produced some magnificent examples — including those above. It is illuminating to search Google for a phrase like intitle:"how" intitle:"is using ai to" and witnessing what is ostensibly breathtaking innovation across industries. A 2023 Guardian story says the “oldest surviving newspaper in the world” — untrue and in spirit only — is using ChatGPT to generate articles from council meeting minutes. According to the Harvard Business Review, construction companies are using large language models to, among other things, summarize documents. Stitch Fix is, according to a disguised ad in Vogue Business, using A.I. to detect trends.

There are countless examples of articles like these illustrating how companies are benefitting from the glow of hype while contributing to it. None of this is to say it is necessarily unearned — maybe detecting money laundering really is more reliable when you run it through A.I. processes. But I remember stories like these in the days when the hot new thing was called “machine learning” or, before that, “big data”. I would not be surprised if these technologies are truly beneficial yet it is hard not to feel the weight of hype and the marketing people behind it all.