I call this cartoon "Pandering to the Buzzwords."

Generative A.I. is the new oat bran. During the height of the oat bran craze, food companies were tossing oat bran into every type of product imaginable — whether it made sense or not. If it had "oat bran" on the label, people would buy it. Similarly, today the term A.I. is vastly overused. Software vendors affix the A.I. label to all kinds of apps that don't necessarily qualify as A.I.. For example, Adobe is touting all of its wares as A.I.-powered. But what they don't tell you is that PhotoShop was doing clever image manipulation decades before A.I. became a household word.

The oat bran craze is now long behind us. Yet, oat bran did not go away. It's still around, and it's still good for you. But it turned out not to be the panacea that its proponents claimed it to be. Likewise, we are (as of 2026) in the midst of the A.I. craze. Eventually, things will settle down. Like oat bran, Generative A.I. won't go away, but we will have a more measured picture of its benefits and drawbacks. Some problems may well best be addressed using Generative A.I.; others may perform better with traditional deterministic algorithms.