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Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

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Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#41

Post by aurareturn »

rimliu wrote: post #33
aurareturn wrote: post #20

There is a difference between a toaster brand saying their toasting now has AI built in vs Anthropic releasing Mythos. The toaster brand is just trying to fool people. Something like Mythos is actually what's driving change. In tech, Microsoft is a big reason for this turnoff. First, they forced Copilot onto Windows users. Second, they decided to market "AI PCs" by forcing AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to put NPUs into th…

Nah, Mythos are Fable primary purpose was marketing. And the fables about their danger were indeed lies.

Nah, Anthropic is the leading AI company.

A toaster company saying their product now has AI is actually turning people off.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#42

Post by jmyeet »

echelon wrote: post #17
dbalatero wrote: post #5

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

[flagged]

> The media is actively instilling hate for AI.

> Data centers are evil. Water is being destroyed. Eight whole rivers are drained to make a cat jpeg.

> Rich people are stealing all the jobs.

That would be a rare occurrence of the media doing its job because literally all of those things are true.

One difference between China and the US is that China won't allow data centers to jack up electricity prices, make things more expensive, be an environmental nightmare or create an unemployment crisis. None of those guardrails exist the US and honestly most Western "democracies".

Maybe there wouldn't be this reaction if we didn't have an affordability crisis and our government wasn't just 5 companies in a trench coat doing its best to do the largest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a different attitude to AI.

I read a thing awhile ago that companies are increasingly resentful of having to go through you to get your money and I think about that often because it feels like the most accurate description of living in 2026.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#43

Post by shafyy »

echelon wrote: post #17
dbalatero wrote: post #5

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

[flagged]

And rightly so

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#44

Post by saintfire »

echelon wrote: post #17
dbalatero wrote: post #5

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

[flagged]

Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who picks up random tools, unrelated to AI, because AI is advertised.

Usually when I see people see a pop-off for Try our AI assistant I hear "Fuck off" or "leave me alone" while they close it. It's like everything has a modern Clippy.

Personally I do see it as a VC signal, as if they gave up on making a good tool and started working on slopifying it.

60% is lower than I imagined, tbh. Most people aren't doing agentic workflows and AI is likely not a selling point.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#46

Post by voidUpdate »

watwut wrote: post #4
voidUpdate wrote: post #3

Maybe if marketing people stopped using the incredibly generic term "AI", and started actually saying what something is, it might work better. When you say "this app is powered by AI", do you mean Skynet, an LLM, or a basic machine learning system?

Literally always LLM. AI is now synonym for LLM, regardless of what it meant before. Just like crypto is now synonym for e-currency and does not mean cryptography anymore. People are not confused about these.

Apart from when they're talking about AI generated videos or images, or the marketing people talking about an AI powered rice cooker https://tefalph.com/cooking-appliances/easy-rice-plus-rice-c... or people watching films where an AI takes over

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#47

Post by jillesvangurp »

It's a bit like 25 years ago when people were slapping web on everything to make it seem better.

Part of this is incentivized by investors that want everything they invest in to be an AI thingy so they can feel good about themselves. So, you have a lot of startups optimizing for that. This is not a new thing of course. Every if-else type logic got shamelessly labeled AI at some point even fifteen years ago. I've been in a few places where that happened.

Other than that, I can't see why consumers should care for most things they actually buy and pay for.

But of course they tend to fall in the feature matrix trap where when faced with choice between product A and product B, they tend to go for the one with the most elaborate spec sheet. Even if most of that is just meaningless word soup to them. True for phones, TVs, stereo equipment, cars, etc. Most people really have no clue what they are buying so they just over pay under the assumption that it will cover their needs. AI goes in a long list of meaningless marketing language that companies use to market their products. Most people say they are not sensitive to that, but their purchase choices usually tell a different story. Marketing people know that.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#50

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #17
dbalatero wrote: post #5

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

[flagged]

[deleted]
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