#27. Weekly AI For Newsroom Roundup. Does AI Have The Worst Marketing Ever?

Hello, this is Sergei!

This week, I read the 404 Media article “Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution.’” And I honestly feel confused, because it shows how early we still are in understanding AI and how much that understanding is being distorted by endless AI slop.

AI probably has the worst marketing of any major technology shift so far. Turning AI into a pop-cultural phenomenon was a very bad idea in general. Most people were introduced to it through the laziest and most obvious use case: generating low-quality spam content. Young people especially got flooded with AI garbage everywhere, so the reaction is predictable — they see the worst implementation of AI, dislike it, and reject the entire idea.

I’m concerned about how the next generation will perceive AI. My son is 15, my daughter is 9, and I often notice how quickly AI gets reduced to “do this for me” instead of being seen as a tool for learning, building, and improving the way we learn, live and work.

The real value of AI is completely different. It’s about investing time and thinking into understanding your own bottlenecks, improving workflows, and building AI-powered systems that save time and make you more... well... powerful. AI should help people think better, work better, and create better things. It’s valuable when it enables you to focus on something more meaningful — not when it generates another 500 SEO posts nobody wants to read.

But maybe I'm too romantic about AI as well.