The Barnum Effect Comes for AI

I noticed that I’m no longer excited but annoyed by AI stuff on social media. The topic has become overhyped, the marketing noisy. It’s so hard to actually find something that lives up to expectations.

And some of you would say this is just how marketing works — how business is done — but I disagree. Markets and smart products existed before AI, and one of the key jobs of any marketing team has always been to showcase a product in a way that makes the user want it while also aligning expectations. Maybe in 2026 it’s a new norm to overpromise, but 5–10 years ago that was called fraud. The recent case where Apple lost in court because they hadn’t delivered Apple Intelligence as they’d presented it is one of the cleanest examples.

As I see it, there are a couple of reasons why this works the way it works.

Top AI companies want to be the new Apple or the new Google. They’ve brought a new kind of powerful technology to the market and their goal is for others to adopt it as a daily tool the way we adopted iPhones and Google Search. So their showcases are simple. Their promises are vague. And they can get away with that because no one knows how to catch them lying — performance of AI models for most end users is kind of an abstract thing, mostly based on vibes.

A lot of people have noticed that old iPhones become worse right after you update iOS to the latest version. Camera worse, battery worse, performance worse — go buy a new one. You’ve probably noticed the same pattern with models: right before a new frontier model drops, the existing model starts to “feel” worse. Everyone goes to Twitter to say that Claude was lobotomized.

So our expectations around new models and AI features are totally fucked. The past couple of years we were promised AGI, but no one knows what AGI is. Even the freaking AGI bench had to release a second version, because their tasks ended up getting solved by non-AGI models.

Hear me out: this situation more and more looks like some kind of fortune-teller or psychic shit. Like astrology, or tarot cards.

The Barnum Effect

All of them work because of the Barnum effect.

Barnum effect — the phenomenon where individuals believe generic, vague personality descriptions apply specifically to them, despite the descriptions being applicable to almost everyone.

The same thing happens with the promises of AI companies. We got lost in the Barnum effect around the words “AI” and “AGI” because everyone is just filling in their own imagination instead of a strict list of use cases and capabilities.

So in some way, we did get the “magic” we were promised. Unfortunately, it turned out to be more the charlatan kind than the Harry Potter kind.

What Startups Can’t Get Away With

We tolerate this from the AI giants, because despite the overpromises we did get a real boost in productivity. We actually got the new tool we use every day — the one that changed our workflow. What we can’t tolerate is the same routine from smaller non-AI products, or from AI startups.

At some point, “having smart features” became a mandatory checkpoint on every product roadmap. So they force somekindofaifeature into the product. And when it’s time to promote it, they do somekindofmarketing — they repeat after the giant AI providers, showcase something simple, say something vague about power, performance, and potential. And that’s the low-quality, low-value content that now fills social media on a daily basis.