According to BBC the phenomenon of AI washing can be defined as claiming to use AI when in reality a less-sophisticated method of computing is being used.

if you wanna be real, I consider all claims of use of AI to be AI washing under this definition. We could debate about whether LLMs or ML is soft-AI all day, but if a government went ahead and gave a regulatory requirement that all uses of “AI” must be (IDK, insert some scifi bullshit, maybe about consciousness, or special audits for mental wellness of AI systems, or something about public ownership) then companies will stop using the term instantly because LLM and ML are not even soft-AI IMO.

I work at a company that marketed itself as AI before LLMs and diffusion models and I was already annoyed then. But basically everyone doing machine learning/neural networks/gans are going to call themselves AI, you can’t join the specific B2B market I’m in and be the only player not AI washing everything you do. Even when LLMs came out we made a big stink about suddenly using LLMs everywhere. Obviously not for our core business model, we still use the pre-existing stuff, our use of LLMs is almost entirely UI fluff (chatbots) and marketing. We do our general “”“AI”“” inhouse, but our LLM usage is 100% outsourced to one or more of OpenAI, Claude, DeepSeek.

For example, when “firms are simply bolting an AI chatbot onto their existing non-AI operating software.”

Now the chatbots we’re making are actually pretty interesting, in the sense that people who use and like github copilot and cursor would understand, but that transplanted specifically into the workflow of something using our B2B product, therefor too niche to explain further without doxxing myself. And by “interesting” I mostly mean “mostly functionally useful and cool scifi while not predatory”. The people we sell software to are 100% predatory, so it’s easy to pretend to be uninvolved with their crimes against humanity.

Douglas Dick, the head of emerging technology risk at KPMG in the UK, told BBC that it is the lack of AI definition and the ambiguity that makes AI washing possible.

100% agree, I wish they’d over regulate the word out of existence to stop people from using it so frivolously.