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The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

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11–20 of 57 posts

Re: The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

#11
"When consumers believe emotional marketing communications are written by AI rather than humans, they judge them as less authentic, feel moral disgust and show weaker engagement and purchase intentions. This happens even when the content is otherwise identical."

Well, in general I do not care either way. I regard all ads as propaganda that attempts to steal my time. However had, even then it is indeed true that AI just is an additional annoyance factor, because it means that no real human really invested time - just AI slop that is spammed down onto people, and wastes their time. So I don't agree with the premise in the article to begin with, but most assuredly it is also true that AI slop just is pissing off people. I am noticing this on youtube too and although I don't have data, it seems that enough people were annoyed that the no-AI movement gained more grounds in the last some weeks. Hopfully we'll eventually reach AI extinction - not likely to happen, since some humans are already addicted to AI (see all "contributed with claude" on github spam), but I regard this as a noble goal. Rid this world of AI.

Re: The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

#12
post #3

Spotify being listed as one of the brands doing AI right is jarring to me. It’s the only one of the companies mentioned where I’ve had multiple conversations with non tech people about how much they hate their AI usage. Specifically in their case the drift to AI produced and performed music in the playlists that are not explicitly labeled as AI. And there seems to be a nuance to what uses people are ok with, large la…

Now, personally I want AI to disappear, but music is one of the few areas where AI COULD be potentially useful. The reason I say this is because for music, the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it. I still think humans are better than AI, but there were audio tracks fully AI generated which was not bad. It does not convince me into one of those humans who fell for the skynet trap and embraced AI, but I also can not say that all of AI is totally useless - just 99.9%.

Re: The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

#13
the big far-right party in Austria recently did an AI poster for their 70 year celebration, and there really were 2 type of responses

- not their target group, thinking it was cringe and boomer-ish

- their uncritical target group, who loved a polished picture of blonde people

Re: The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

#14

It's not just AI first companies..there's a place near me that tried to usr AI images in their social media ads. Completely blew up their relationship with the community. People would have preferred a cell phonr picture of their actual food to an AI generated approximation..

I've noticed this happening more and more! Mainly with restaurants! There's an indian place just down the street from my place with a menu composed of entirely (badly) AI generated curry pictures in the window. It turns everyone off eating there because it feels like they're somehow lying about what they sell. I get that curry is probably hard to photograph unprofessionally and still make it look appetizing, but I would've preferred

    Vindaloo [price]
    [short description]
over

    Vindaloo [price]              |red curdled horror|
    [emoji riddled description]   |in a weird bowl   |

Re: The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

#16

Ironic that this very article has been partially written with AI... kind of lost the drive to read it

Yep. And if you want to integrate AI into your products, like we are currently doing, you are best off just delivering features / products and concealing the fact it's "AI" instead of putting it front and centre. AI has a rather tarnished brand amongst many groups of people.

More subtle thought-out AI tends to work better than AI for the sake of it anyway. If you deliver something useful, people will end up using it. A lot of current AI use is not particularly useful though.

Re: The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

#19
post #3

Spotify being listed as one of the brands doing AI right is jarring to me. It’s the only one of the companies mentioned where I’ve had multiple conversations with non tech people about how much they hate their AI usage. Specifically in their case the drift to AI produced and performed music in the playlists that are not explicitly labeled as AI. And there seems to be a nuance to what uses people are ok with, large la…

Now, personally I want AI to disappear, but music is one of the few areas where AI COULD be potentially useful. The reason I say this is because for music, the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it. I still think humans are better than AI, but there were audio tracks fully AI generated which was not bad. It does not convince me into one of those humans who fell for the skynet trap and…

I feel that "good" music has some emotional resonance with me, at some level. In my opinion AI won't ever be able generate what I'm looking for, it always strikes me as somewhat bland or seems too much like another track.

Background music in distracting environments, where the listening is maybe the third or fourth thing I'm doing, maybe AI will be acceptable.

Re: The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

#20

Ironic that this very article has been partially written with AI... kind of lost the drive to read it

Yep. And if you want to integrate AI into your products, like we are currently doing, you are best off just delivering features / products and concealing the fact it's "AI" instead of putting it front and centre. AI has a rather tarnished brand amongst many groups of people.

How much of that is just pattern recognition?

I dislike AI because the result has consistently been bad. The most enthusiastic AI co-workers are producing garbage at a 100x rate, while the non-enthusiastic responsible ones are left reading and reviewing it.

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