absolutely not...the amount of homophobia and racism and antisemitism and nationalism etc... was pretty intense compared to what you see in most parts of the current internet.
IRC tended towards super edge humor and was a big piece of like early internet culture generators like somethingawful and 4chan.
This is definitely a take that ignores the massive amount of utility for ML that exists outside of generative images and NLP on the one hand and on the other vastly misrepresents the time it takes to understand a model, assuming one does not already have a background in CS, linear algebra and in particular matrix calculus, probability, stats, etc...
This was one of the first books my advisor told me to read when I started my ML phd a...long time ago. The fundamentals of machine learning haven't changed and it's a great book.
at the lower level - detecting senders trying to send spam is a big one as well as detecting sending / deliverability problems
I'm not familiar with what mailchimp is actually doing with their marketing automation / analytics stuff but you could use "AI" ( or basically statistics in this case ) to analyze the resultant data.
I escaped the south 16 years ago and I never want to fucking go back.
Further the bay area is home to many unique cultures that are sadly seriously distressed thanks to the housing situation, yet tenaciously persist as best they can.