AI's Perception Problem

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

 

If you’ve read or heard much about artificial intelligence, then you have likely seen stories about mistakes that it made, problems that have been experienced with it, or the hallucinations that it has experienced. You don’t need to look very far to find examples of bad AI-created pictures, ridiculous AI source statements, or clearly inaccurate facts presented as absolute truth.

But you have to look a lot harder to find the good news stories. That’s partly because AI doing what it’s supposed to do just isn’t news worthy. You aren’t going to generate much attention with a headline like “AI-Enabled E-commerce Engines Improve Recommendations for Shoppers.”

There’s also the reality that a lot of successful AI applications today are little more than evolutions of technology that was already operating effectively in those spaces. (There were still algorithms recommending purchases to shoppers long before AI “officially” came along, for example.)

Does that mean that AI is all hype and no help? No, it just means that there’s more interest in—and attention paid to—the bad news stories. Especially if they end up being humorous or ridiculous, which AI-related errors often are. It also means that there is already a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to AI.

I’ve heard from a couple …

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