Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wpvip.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 608 posts

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

#191

Post by Forgeties79 »

nerdjon wrote: post #13

This is the problem with all of the recent “AI” crap that has been shoved into our devices. We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face. Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively…

It’s because they don’t know the actual benefits yet and are all hoping they either accidentally stumble across it/one of us finds the billion dollar application for them.

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

#192

Post by ryukoposting »

estaroc wrote: post #141
inigyou wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the rare exception. Almost nobody prefers an artisanal chair over one from IKEA, especially when they see the price tag.

I think most people would in fact prefer an artisanal chair if not for the price, not just "especially" accounting for price. Not a good comparison here though, because most products are not cheaper to the consumer due to AI - only cheaper (in theory) to the provider.

Bingo. They weren't paying for gmail before, and they still aren't paying for it now that it's more annoying than it used to be.

I suspect that, in many cases, AI features actually make a product more expensive for the operator. Imagine how much of doordash's money you could burn by telling its chatbot that the only way for you to figure out where the driver left your order is to create a todo app in React.

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

#193

Post by stvltvs »

smcl wrote: post #116
torben-friis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many. What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!" You might as well ma…

Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in…

And frustrating automated voice systems, support chat bots that go in circles, etc.

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

#194

Post by hvs »

My wife, who honestly tries to avoid technology at all costs, was working on her business site and said, "It's almost impossible to find any good stock photos with all the AI slop out there."

AI, among non-tech people means two things: slop and shitty customer service bots.

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

#195

Post by dsign »

Not to detract of any of the other reasons given so far for people disliking 'AI' in the brand messaging, there's the additional "snob factor" that the average consumer will reject (perhaps because it's culturally trained to do so).

To put it simply, the last few decades have been about glorifying the average Simpson. KISS and Marvel movies. Trump-level speech. And now along comes something that is going to take the pain of deep complicated thinking away (what a relief!), but the damn villain not only walks the talk[^1], it also unfortunately talks the talk with complicated words, correct capitalization and (gasp!) em--dashes. What's not to hate about it?

[^1]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192777/walk-the-...

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

#196

Post by ecshafer »

This reminds me of [Steve Job's response about OpenDoc at a conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o) where he points out that focus on the tech isn't as important as focus on the product. Companies are pitching the technology first and not the product, but customers want the product.

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

#197

Post by RugnirViking »

bluGill wrote: post #119
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…

A toaster with AI could potentially be useful. I've never had a toaster that can make toast for the whole family - you can do 2 slices but then you have to wait several minutes for it to cool down before making the next otherwise the second batch will not be done. (I have used restaurant toasters that can do this, but they are not for home use)

even a kalman filter would be overkill for this. Just buy a toaster that isn't terrible, the calibre of hardware needed for this costs $0.02 for a pack of 10 - thats the level of cheapness needed to make a toaster that bad.

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

#198

Post by yawnxyz »

> "Bot fatigue sets in when the internet stops feeling honest"

if there's anything worse than LLM-written text, it's websites that rally against LLMs and AI-use, then blatantly just use AI to do the thing they're against

if you're going to be anti-ai, at least don't use it!!

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

#199

Post by venzaspa »

bluGill wrote: post #119
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…

A toaster with AI could potentially be useful. I've never had a toaster that can make toast for the whole family - you can do 2 slices but then you have to wait several minutes for it to cool down before making the next otherwise the second batch will not be done. (I have used restaurant toasters that can do this, but they are not for home use)

I have a Sage toaster (Brevile in some markets) which does exactly this, even has a progress bar that counts down when your toast will popup.

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

#200

Post by nerdjon »

nonethewiser wrote: post #140
nerdjon wrote: post #13

This is the problem with all of the recent “AI” crap that has been shoved into our devices. We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face. Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively…

Uhhh kind of. What you say is definitely true of some products but it's funny, because the EXACT same criticisms were levied against machine learning. - "ML is such a buzzword. Everyone is trying to shoe-horn it into their product." - "Why are they putting 'machine learning' in their hero section? Just do the thing well. ML is an implementation detail." - "You dont even need ML for this. Simple linear regression woul…

There is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles. Or at most there was a quick reference to "ML" when a feature was announced but it wasn't shoving "ML is doing this THIS" in every UI it could.

Sure we could argue that there were times that ML was likely not really necessary, but it was still largely invisible to the user what the mechanism was.

I think about autocorrect, sentence completion (or just next word recommendation), music recommendations, etc. All of those were clearly ML but the user was not made aware of that at every step of using them and in many cases it being ML was only in technical documents or the original announcement.

Now obviously there are exceptions to this, but it was the exception that shoved ML in your face compared to the current situation around AI.

Post reply on HN