As companies announce their earnings for the quarter, one acronym will feature even more prominently than "EBITDA": AI.

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The problem is that artificial intelligence (AI) iA It makes it increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction, and is causing broader problems for both the technology and the economy.

The most common example is job cuts. When companies announce job cuts, reduced hiring or smaller grad programs, they are increasingly citing AI as a key reason. But is this true?

The problem is that they have an incentive to lie. Nobody wants to admit that they hired too many people and now have to cut back, or worse, that things aren't going well inside the company and that they need to scale back staff because of lower revenues.

A better option is to be able to both announce the job cuts while also coming across as innovative - hence the appeal of the AI fig leaf. It's also much more politically palatable to blame the robots than to blame the senior executives.

AI is not just a fig leaf for job cuts, either. It can also be handy if your company is struggling to innovate.

If things are quiet on the innovation front, you essentially have two choices: be up front about it or throw money at something to give the facade of innovation.

Historically this is where a quick acquisition comes in handy. This is where a big company buys a small or medium-sized company that is doing something cool so that the big company can then tell everyone about how they have a fresh new capability.

This strategy doesn't work well when interest rates are high and money is expensive.

Enter AI. With lots of AI tools floating around, companies can throw some money at those tools or........

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