Yes, repeatedly, since well before this particular AI summer.

One previous attempt at AI was "expert systems", and while the term fell out of use it's functionally about the same as basically all modern business systems, and doing that wrong led to a lot of people being prosecuted for crimes they didn't commit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

If you insist on learning systems, all AB testing counts, and from that we get meta making their products into hyper-stimuli for vulnerable teens: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/meta-meta-...

Even without that lawsuit, there have been various concerns that "the algorithm" (of Twitter/X, FB, Instagram, YouTube, Google, everyone) has propagandising biases that damage society. I don't know how to sift fact from politicking with that.

Like, is all of statistics just basically AI, or is there a meaningful difference?

Pretty much the same, yeah; the maths of finding a decision boundary for a perceptron echos the maths for a line of best fit.

Horizon was accounting software - where is the connection to expert systems?

Sounds like corporations can have bad motivations, and can make bad software - no AI required.

> Horizon was accounting software - where is the connection to expert systems?

  "it's functionally about the same as basically all modern business systems"

> can make bad software - no AI required

All AI *is software*; and by the old definition of AI, almost all modern software *is AI*.

Disagree, words drift but they still mean things. Nobody building accounting software in the 90s called it AI (or even an expert systems, barring the most inventive salescritters).

Besides what kind of slippery slope argument is this? All software is AI, so if you do harm with software, AI is a harmful technology? Seems like a not very helpful model of the world.