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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

#261

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.

This should be regarded as a failure of the markets.

This anti consumer crap, that people demonstrably hate, worked! It worked to increase share price. We should all see that as a a fundamental failure of the market to transmit information about what brings the consumer value. Instead, it has been rewarded to the tune of trillions of dollars, a huge segment of society's resources.

There is a sense among level-headed people that the market is irrational "right now," but it's been years of this shit. When do we call a spade a spade?

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

#262
post #30

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.

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.

Because using AI in a product description is a signal to venture capital if private and investors if public, that your stock price deserves to go up.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, not really? I did make it. Thought it would be interesting. Is that I mentioned the name of a company I used?

This is a thread about how AI signals cheap and low quality. You can't be that surprised that your self-promotion of an AI product garnered a little negative attention...

I didn't promote a product. I was showing that low sports radio shows aren't really any better than easy to make AI podcasts that cover the same topics. Just tried and true host personas (the over reactor, the crank seen it all before, the stats guy, the callers) is just wrapped around the stats of the game. People mention claude in their comments all the time and they aren't flagged as promoting a product. The podcast I linked...ah never mind.

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

#264
The AI branding isn't aimed at consumers, it's aimed at investors. What consumers think about it is irrelevant.

This isn't unique to tech, either. In recent years, I've started to notice all the advertising around me increasingly targeting businesses and investors rather than the average person. Feels like we're quickly moving towards a post-consumer society, in which trying to convince the average middle class consumer to buy your product is no longer relevant, because that's simply not where the money is anymore.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

There's an almost total, unprecedented disconnect between C-suite perceptions of AI and user perceptions.

In C-suites AI appears to be some kind of limitless source of goodness and profits, so companies must optimise hard for it, or risk getting left behind.

Everyone else is either "Has some uses if you steer it carefully" or "Hell no."

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists. But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.

> how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists Spotify was praised as an alternative to piracy that gave some money to artists at a price that consumers wouldn’t complain too much about. You don’t have to look at Spotify, though. Look at all of the people who won’t even pay Spotify or Netflix rates for content because they know they can pay $0 to pirate it.

Sorry my friend, but Netflix is not a good product. It has a limited selection and, at least for my account, a lot of commercial ads. I am not pirating but I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.

bTW - I stopped watching Netflix.

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

#268

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…

Also the product itself is likely to suck. One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change. I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change over…

> The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.

It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:

> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.

Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.

Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.

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

#269

Then why did openAI make gazillions in revenue

It's easy to make an enormous amount of revenue selling $50 bills for $10.

There's a big chance that you work at a company that does exactly that

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

#270
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My washing machine also has this AI icon. Not a big deal but it makes me roll my eyes everytime I see it.

That's actually a feature that washing machines have had for a while - "generative washing" - it is where the extra odd socks come from.
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