In a recent column, New York Times technology correspondent Kevin Roose revealed a conversation he had shared with Bing's Chatbot that's equal parts fascinating and unsettling. The artificial intelligence service in question is a sibling of the popular ChatGPT, produced by the American artificial intelligence company OpenAI. But Roose wasn't just chatting with the OpenAI Codex, the company's most recent model, he was speaking with its chat mode persona, Sydney, a name given to it by Microsoft in its early stages of development. Though Roose and Sydney's conversation is, at first glance, alarming, the AI's responses to Roose's questions are far from unexpected. Its erratic use of emojis and seemingly unfiltered, emotional way of speaking feels human because, in some ways, it is – just not in the way our cultural anxieties over artificial intelligence might lead us to believe (Olson, 2023).

Once rooted in the realm of science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) is now a huge part of our everyday lives. We just don't recognize it. These are all examples of AI in action. Okay, but what does that really mean? Put simply, AI is where machines observe, make sense of, learn from, and interface with the external world – without humans explicitly programming it.

Competitors are doing everything they can to let their customers know that their AI and ML is, in fact, one step ahead of the other guys'. So, is it all just a marketing stunt? Or are these technologies that have the power to transform how we think about cybersecurity? Before unpacking this confusing answer, we need to agree on some terms. Much of the confusion surrounding the AI/ML debate centers on loosely defined terms being thrown around without much care for accuracy or precision.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become such a buzzword that it's at risk of becoming no more than tech marketing pixie dust. Just sprinkle a little here and suddenly, your solution inherits the foresight of a self-driving Tesla and the simplicity of an Amazon Echo. As more solutions crowd the cybersecurity market touting the benefits of AI, it's important to read through the hype. Machine learning (ML) can deliver transformative insights in some domains, but it has limitations. My goal is to help you pick apart vendor claims.

As it goes every year, one hot feature sets a trend in technology, and suddenly every company boasts some variation of which that is uniquely theirs. This year, that feature is AI. Hot on the heels of Alexa's and Google Assistant's holiday successes, Artificial Intelligence on phones has become the de facto must-have feature – whether consumers know it or not. In any case, manufacturers seem not to realize that AI doesn't mean "Anything Intuitive" – that's just how operating systems are supposed to be. Yet it seems that OEM's are eager to label nearly any vaguely intuitive feature as AI.