I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.
And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
I like this guy. :D
Remember the "smart"-crisis? Smart-fridge, smart oven, smart cars, smart-TV. AI is the next evolution of that, except that this time, it's not mostly limited to consumers / individuals, but can also widely be used by companies. And the average suit is just as stupid as the average consumer.
People are obsessed with technology nowadays, so when the latest tech is finally in a working state and presented to the world, they all rush to use it and to apply it to things it's not designed for.
Then, you add to this the fact that fake-intelligence is a very good illusion for consciousness. From a non-tech guy, if he can have a discussion with an AI like ChatGPT, he will (wrongly) imagine the AI has some sort of consciousness of its own, as if it was a real person, rather than just a more complex algorithm of Google search. If AIs weren't allowed to use "I" to talk about themselves, I bet people wouldn't feel as comfortable using them.
It Is my personal opinion that since WW2 there has been a fanatical belief that "new=good" and that "change=positive". Well, to quote Cheshire Cat in Alice: Madness Returns (very inspiring source, I know), "change(new) is neither good nor bad, it only means it's not the same anymore".