Interesting article. There is always risk that a new hot technique will get more attention that it ultimately warrants.
For me the key quote in the article is
"Most scientists aren’t trying to mislead anyone, but because they face strong incentives to present favorable results, there’s still a risk that you’ll be misled."
Understanding people's incentives is often very useful when you're looking at what they're saying.
There are those who have realised they can make a lot of cash from it and also get funding by using the term AI. But at the end of the day what software doesn't have some machine learning built in. It's nothing new, nor is the current implementations particularly extraordinary or accurate.
Plenty of software has zero ML. But either way not all ML is the same. There are many different algorithms each with their own tradeoffs. AI as it is presently marketed however usually means one type of AI, large language model, which also has tradeoffs, and is a bit new to the scene compared to say markov chains whose history starts in the early 1900s.
For me the key quote in the article is
"Most scientists aren’t trying to mislead anyone, but because they face strong incentives to present favorable results, there’s still a risk that you’ll be misled."
Understanding people's incentives is often very useful when you're looking at what they're saying.