Why is AI so popular when nobody wants it?

Summary

You'd have to be living on Mars to have avoided all the hype about AI over the past couple of years. Businesses have been trying to ride the wave of enthusiasm by adding artificial intelligence into all their products. Results have been mixed to say the least. Apple has delayed rolling out much of their Apple Intelligence portfolio because it frankly doesn't work. Consumer research shows that customers are at best ambivalent about AI and in some cases are actively hostile to, saying they'd be less likely to purchase a product that had AI integration.Processor-maker Intel has admitted that nobody is buying their AI-enhanced PC chips. Even the big cloud hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services seem to be pulling back from the data centre deployments they had planned as unpinning their AI offerings.Concerns about AI-generated slop and its enshittification of the internet are starting to break through to the mainstream. People are tired of seeing generative AI being passed off as real but at the same time there is enthusiasm for new AI trends. A couple of weeks ago social media was awash with ChatGPT-generated action figures although the fad died as quickly as it arose.So why is AI getting so much attention when it seems that there is limited actual demand for it? Firstly, it still sounds kinda cool. We haven't yet crested the wave of hype that crashes into the gulf of disappointment. People are still holding on expecting something mind-blowing simply because of the rate of announcements coming from tech companies. It's a self-sustaining hype circus. Companies are putting out releases almost every day which promise some kind of breakthrough. By the time sceptics and user experience catch up with one wave, there's another couple crashing into the news coverage. This kind of hype is going to keep going until either companies run out of things to announce or people's day-to-day experiences are sufficiently divergent from the promises in the press releas...