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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

#101

I’m sure there are some good AI products but the vast majority seem to be garbage. The exception is coding agents and simple web text/image interfaces. So yeah, as a signal the AI brand is about as bad as it gets. Crypto tier. But just like crypto, the investors want to see that signal regardless of any underlying substance.

The exception is translation. Translation is what transformers were originally developed for. LLMs shine in translation, and creating code is, after all, a translation from natural language into a programming language.

A lot of what current LLMs are good at seems to boil down to translation:

* Translate some prompt into a planning list of individual TODOs

* Treat each TODO as a new translation (e.g. from TODO to code), or call some external tool (lookup something on the internet, static code analysis, database request)

* Translate the result(s) of these TODOs into a final text, or into a new TODO list

To me, this is interesting, because maybe the Homo Sapiens intelligence simply developed as a side effect of communication (translating words into actions).

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

#102
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why it’s so perplexing as a consumer when AI gets pushed so hard as if it’s a feature. Consumers don’t care what code your devs use, what cloud platform you deploy on, so why should they care about AI in your product? AI is not a feature; features are features tell me about those.

I believe the issue here is that, simply due to how these products came to market, "AI" is extremely vague, and slapping "AI" on every single thing makes it almost a negative signal for quality. For most users "AI" probably just means "chatbot" - and that's not compelling, because they can already access a chatbot, why would they want one in every product they use? The more advanced features / workflows that LLMs can…

AI in various forms are used all over, but do your point - users don't know it is AI. They also don't care. They care what AI does, and that is the feature that gets advertised, that AI does it they don't care. They are mostly not chatting with the machines and devices that have AI, they are pushing a button and letting the machine work for them while they sit back and relax (or more often go on to do other things)

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

#104

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…

More people see/are aware of the toaster than Mythos - those pointless integrations are (I suspect) what's driving sentiment.

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

#105

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.

the consumers will get what the oligarchs want

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That mentality existed well before AI. See out-sourcing.

Strangely enough, I don't recall any companies advertising to consumers that they outsourced.

I guess they can say "Made in China, designed by Apple in California" in the packaging but at least they still take pride in the design. With AI it sounds you are disavowing also the authorship of the design.

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

#107
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real thing i think people forget is that humans actually value time and effort from other humans. AI is often used by people who want to do neither and that's really what it boils down to. Ask yourself, would you like to receive a christmas or birthday card with a personalized message or something produced you know was 100% produced by AI bot - even better when it has a hallucination in there.

Hallmark built a brand on creating generic messages in card.

They have enough different cards that at least you know effort was put into choosing the card. Also effort was put into buying the card at a store, signing it (often/hopefully with a short message), and sending it.

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rich people are stealing all the jobs. The AI promoters are themselves saying these things because it is the positive case for their business, that other businesses can pay them for AI services that are cheaper and better than keeping existing jobs. > Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be com…

You should've seen what the internal combustion engine did to the horse and cart industry.

And I'm sure the 50 year-old guy with the nice job at the stables just loved hearing Henry Ford talk about how nobody was going to own horses anymore.

This is an article about consumer sentiment. Consumers care much more about their own financial security than about Sam Altman's vision of a glorious future.

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

#109

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.

For me personally, it’s because “AI-powered” products are the most unreliable, buggy and annoying.

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

#110
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The only one that's not entirely true is the water usage concern. The vast amount of water usage is non-consumptive, and you can even use reclaimed wastewater. To be clear, I'm on your side-- I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

> I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation.

Your enemies aren’t afraid to spout misinformation, and they’re winning.

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