AI Marketing: Stumbling From Error Into Ethical Dilemma

July 8, 2025

Zaarin -- Founder n·h·g

A woman writes an e-mail to her lover. As she types, a grayed out word appears ahead of her cursor, in anticipation of what she wants to say. It reminds her of her grade school friend who always cut off her sentences with her own retorts.

A gymnast’s search engine result begins with four paragraphs of prose before the link she was looking for.

A multitude of people sit back in their chair, let out an exasperated groan blurting “this damned computer!”

These are effects of the corporate world shoving AI down the throats of an unwilling public.

"Oops! That was a rare learning edge-case we take seriously and are actively improving with human oversight—trust us, it’s getting better."


Real technology innovations have been hard to come by. In 1999, the Blackberry 850 came out, the first cellphone with data capability. Since then, we’ve had a new type of device called 'the tablet' arriving in 2010. 2014 saw the introduction of voice assistants like Alexa. Wearable devices began their popularity in 2020. Every other product that came to the consumer market was just a twist on the same thing.

During this same period, financial markets have been plagued with stagnant growth. Investors are so starved for investments they jump on bandwagons at every opportunity. You just have to look at the cryptocurrency market to see how determined they are to boost their portfolio. In the same way, the builders of compute centers need to see some kind of return on their significant return. Sadly, the whips of nervous investors are forcing errors in the marketing of its product.

First of all, what they are marketing as intelligence, is actually a technology called a Large Language Model (LLM). It is a technology that finds relationships in millions and billions of datasets. It needs enormous amounts of input to be able to find enough patterns to give a simulated appearance of intelligence. Analyzing so much data takes up enormous amounts of compute power. However, its product is only ‘prediction’. It is an eager child trying to say what it thinks you want to hear. It can only draw on the information it has been fed. It cannot create anything on its own. It cannot invent, imagine or hypothesize. If it has not been fed input about a subject, it will ignore your request and talk about something it does know about. If it knows A=B and B=C, if it does not exist in its trained data, it cannot infer that A=C. It can tell you what is in the data and find patterns in the data, but that is it. It calculates the most probable response that you are looking for. It patches together pieces of data from here and there to assemble a reasonable facsimile of a person who has read an encyclopedia. This is not intelligence as I understand it. It is not even an artificial intelligence, it is a hack and a parlor trick.

Can you think back and remember how you learned things? About programming languages, I read books and learned fastest by doing and solving problems. At that, the LLM’s can do very well, but this is only the processing of information, an ability computers have always performed well at. But what about creating something? How did you learn to create something that you have never seen before? This is what we have to teach computers to do if we want to create a real intelligence. This feat is many decades and probably centuries away. Artificial sentience, one where a mechanical being perceives it is the center of its own universe, is not only a technical feat, but one humanity would naturally be hostile toward.


tears Don’t blame LLM’s for the current marketing craze, like everything wrong in this world, it is the fault of corporate boards. The people who are so far detached from their customer, who invested so heavily in illusions, that are to blame. They have no idea how to market a product, short of trying absolutely everything, all at once. Despite their insistence that LLM’s are a ground breaking technology that will revolutionize the planet, it is just another tool. Like the hype of a Hollywood movie, the clouds of promises and forecasting gone wrong, will part and we will end up using it as it was intended for the things it is actually good at.

Like a young man on a first date, these poor corporate lackeys are so focused on being liked, they forget everything important that you have to do before you can build up to that point. They have no salesmanship, rapport or charisma. All they have is a forceful hand. The unwanted, and unrequested introduction of LLM’s into their cloud offerings have set back their agenda. They forgot that our electronic devices are our tools for work, life and family. We use them to gain more control over our lives. Those who lean heavily on cloud services are finding out that the control they thought they had over their device, was actually in the hands of someone else. It is this jarring realization that is resisting the adoption of LLM’s, and not any aversion to the technology itself.

The tech industry so mishandled LLM’s that some of the creative leaders who could most benefit from the leap forward in reasoning speed that it offers are the most resistant to it. LLM’s are trained on their work and instructed to generate pieces in a similar style. Of course, these creators are going to be hostile. It is any wonder that just recently, authors joined voices from the music and motion picture industries in denouncing the use of LLM’s. To get creative people on board, they should have consulted with them. Told them there is a technology where we can feed it all the books you have written. When you want to write a new book, you tell the computer what you want the plot to be, the characters, setting, and all other pertinent details and together, like a fast word processor, you can write your next book more efficiently. Like the initial adoption of word processors, some would agree, and others would insist on banging away on their typewriter.


nokia But, that’s not what happened. Just like Scarlett Johansson waking up to news that a chat voice assistant sounds just like her; authors, photographers, illustrators, painters, songwriters and others discovered that anyone with a fast enough computer, or enough time could generate a production with similar characteristics to their own. All without consultation, or consent. It must be LLM’s running their own marketing because it appears indifferent to the concerns of their users, or even humanity in general because the industry as a whole has had a series of confusion and error. You would think that these glaring errors or failures would not have passed even the most casual review by the laziest quality control consultant. Some even have difficulty knowing what exactly their product is supposed to do.

If the word ‘AI’ had any brand power, it now has been reduced to another meaningless buzzword thanks to:
People have a natural aversion to change. Sudden changes can appear hostile. Changes in a tool we rely on can be a deep betrayal, causing stress, confusion and fear. Compound that with that the computer illiteracy of the general public, it is a recipe for outrage. To protect you from someone fiddling with your digital tools that you rely on, there are things you can do to ensure they are reliable, working they way you want. The most important is to obviously stop using cloud based services. All these services have versions that you can download onto your personal computer, and tweak them to your hearts content. They will never change one day because you have control over them. Those of us deploying self-hosted services never experienced the AI intrusion, or even the earlier interface redesign intrusions, in our devices. You can still search for versions of software that are not cloud based, and install those. The way you set them up will stay like that until you change it. Computers are highly configurable. They can easily bend to the way you want to work. There are even retro enthusiasts who setup their computer as if its 1990.

With cloud based computing, you are essentially using someone else’s computer, one you do not control. If you are connecting to it through the internet, or is on proprietary software installed to your phone, it is owned by a someone else. You are not their customer, they are not responsible to you in any way. Their customers are advertisers, who they supply your data to.


justsayno The reason Microsoft Windows is installed on computers when you buy them is because Microsoft pays the manufacturer to put it there knowing the general public will just go the easy route and leave it on. Every version of Windows after 7 is filled with bloat, telemetry spyware and who knows what else that does not deserve to be on your machine. You are much better installing a Linux operating system. I personally have Linux Mint and everyone who has asked me to setup their computer, including my mother has received it on their system, and I have never heard a single complaint. Other members at n·h·g use Ubuntu, Debian, ArchLinux, and others. It is a very personal choice. Check out videos about other operating systems. There is probably one specially targeted to you.

Decide how far you want to take ownership of your tools, and your data. Will you get rid of your smartphone all together? It could be that if the tech companies push this farce much harder, my next phone will be a regular old dumb Nokia-style phone. Do you really want software on there scanning, analyzing and reporting back all the data you enter into it? It's a bit uncomfortable to me.

Having said all that, the negative press around AI stems from human missteps—whether through poor implementation, overhyped marketing, or ethical oversights—don’t judge the technology by its worst headlines. AI itself is a tool, shaped by how we use it. Take the time to explore it for yourself. Understand its strengths, limitations, and potential—and decide how it might fit into your life or work. The future of AI isn’t predetermined; it’s something we all help shape. It even might mean we have to self-host our own LLM's to get them to work the way we want.

Zaarin -- Founder n·h·g