The AI Marketing BS Index

speckx 96 points 19 comments April 01, 2026
bastian.rieck.me · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (10 comments)

snapcaster

A similar BS is also every CEO claiming AI made their company 10x faster yet GDP trends not really budging

kusokurae

I submit that doing (4) earns 40 points, rather than 20.

swyx

- report benchmark that conveniently omits well known SOTAs, 20 points - conveniently omit well known benchmarks because not SOTA, 30 points - change one tiny term in GRPO and call it a completely different acronym, 50 points - try to slide in a systems hack and but title your paper as though it is a model improvement, 100 points (prizes to the first replier who figures out which recent paper i am subtweeting here) - forbes 30 under 30, 100 points

PaulHoule

The list avoids many of the real sins and has plenty of mis-analysis, for instance, 20 points for doing the usual motte-and-bailey or hedging in the form of “It is not X. It is Y.” I mean, that language pattern is often appropriate but for people who are paying attention today it is a sign of... something. I mean, I am tired of Copilot giving answers like "You're not a fur, you're a therianthrope" It is really a tracer, I think, for someone for whom the lights are on and nobody is home, like they want to be a top blogger about AI but they haven't caught on that the "It's not X, it's Y" pattern is a tell.

vivid242

-10 points if you actually read your marketing yourself before copy and pasting it on the website

thefz

Could not care less about AI, but this font is amazing.

djha-skin

I call upon this body to draw up a spreadsheet of some popular AI marketing and their scores.

n1tro_lab

500 points if your "AI agent" is a ChatGPT wrapper that reads a CSV and sends a Slack message but your pitch deck says "autonomous multi-agent orchestration platform"

heresie-dabord

Highlights from the Crackpot Index [1] that inspired TFA: 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment. 5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards). 10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity. 10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it. 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it. 20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize. 20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories. 20 points for naming something after yourself. (E.g., talking about the "The Evans Field Equation" when your name happens to be Evans.) 20 points for talking about how great your theory is, but never actually explaining it. 40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts. [1] _ https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

argee

The author has gone so far as to link to Motte-and-Bailey fallacy (doctrine?) [0], but after reading it I see no relation to "It's not X, it's Y"? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

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