Oh great gaming gods, hear our prayer: Please may 2026 prove to be the year in which the AI bubble bursts. Amen. A rather splendid sign of at least one big-name tech company backing away from the bullshit claims comes from a PC Gamer interview with Dell’s head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, who outright stated that consumers just don’t care about AI, and aren’t drawn in by its addition to products.
“What we’ve learned over the course of this year,” says Terwilliger to PCG‘s Dave James, “especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI. In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.”
This is not to say that Dell is backing away from AI as a feature within its tech (baby steps), but rather is just avoiding mentioning the topic during its latest raft of announcements during CES 2026. James reports that the Dell presentation from vice chairman Jeff Clarke only mentioned the near-meaningless two letters once, and in a pejorative fashion, saying “we have this un-met promise of AI.” Instead, the speech focused on new laptops and desktop computers, the challenges of tariffs, and some shiny new monitors. You know, like hardware manufacturers used to do.
So when Dave James spoke to Dell’s Kevin Terwilliger, he brought up how conspicuous the topic was in its absence, given the tedious ubiquity of the subject for the last few years. “One thing you’ll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first,” Terwilliger told PCG. “So a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC.”
What strikes me most about this is not the lack of being AI-forward, but the willingness to call out that it was dumb to have been so in 2025. While he adds that “we’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device,” the change in emphasis feels very significant.
The reality is, “AI” as a term means so many different things in so many different circumstances that it’s useless. For decades, in gaming, it was the term used to describe the programmed behavior of NPCs, until it was clumsily repurposed by companies like OpenAI, Google, and X to instead be shorthand for “generative-AI” like LLMs, the plagiarism machines that are fed all the content of the internet and then regurgitate it in slightly different, significantly less accurate forms. But when computer manufacturers use it, it’s something else all over again, software that “learns” based on experience, allowing for high-speed adjustments to ideally improve performance. In that sense, it’s somewhat more like the algorithms being used in scientific research to dramatically speed up fields like medical research, also usually just called “AI.”
So hurrah to Dell for being bold enough to back away from the bullshit. May it be the first of very many, as we start to see “AI” exposed as the grift it truly has become, and hopefully a new emphasis on celebrating creativity and originality, whether it’s aided by AI-driven GPUs or not.
