Ai robot to talk to

About 250 years ago, a Hungarian inventor named Wolfgang Von Klempen claimed to have invented a chess-playing automaton. He called it the Mechanical Turk. It could play chess and beat even the best players. People were stunned by what seemed like the first instance of artificial intelligence. But the Mechanical Turk was a hoax. The box concealed a chess player inside who was making all the moves.

So corporations began promoting paper straws and cloth bags. They bought carbon credits and installed some solar facilities on their premises. They led tree-planting drives in cities while stripping large swathes of the Amazon and Sumatran forests. This practice is now known as greenwashing, where companies exaggerate their commitments to sustainability and the environment.

The controversy involving Galgotias University showcasing a Chinese-manufactured robot dog as its own product on February 17 at the India AI Impact Summit underway in Delhi calls to mind how greenwashing by giant corporations has been expanded to the current hype, artificial intelligence.

Now, companies have discovered a new and analogous practice: AI-washing. Here, they exaggerate artificial intelligence capabilities, often at great cost to their customers, investors and even society.

Many years ago, multinational companies discovered that sustainability was a buzzword, even as they were destroying forests, polluting rivers and seas, and their executives were flying in to work on private jets. But they had to tell their customers, as well as regulators and society at large, that they cared about the environment.