The general public is poorly informed about the current state of AI technologies, and researchers and the journalists who cover their work are doing a poor job of explaining to people what recent advancements in AI are really about. And given some of the recent coverage of AI in the popular press, it's hard to argue with the perspective. In a presentation at the recent MIT EmTech 2018 conference in Cambridge, Mass., Lipton talked about how people with little technical skill and understanding are increasingly becoming influencers in the world of AI, taking advantage of the hype cycle around AI to promote themselves. This, in turn, feeds a media system that gives more attention to splashy quotes than to deep technical explanations. How many times in the last year have we read headlines about Elon Musk's warnings to humanity about the coming robot apocalypse?