Does anyone know who the authors of the study are and what the data basis was (how many people were interviewed, age brackets, etc.)?
Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
491–500 of 608 posts
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#492>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…
What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest
Goodhart's Law will always be a factor, and "the bottom line" is largely the ultimate perverse metric for Goodhart's Law. If doing something everyone hates still has a chance to increase revenue, it's still "winning" to management.
Low quality "spam" tactics still reel in enough fish to be monetarily worth the "backlash" from customers that find it distasteful and or start to lose trust in the company. The "We promise we don't spam people" metrics and "Consumer distrust" metrics don't talk enough to the "revenue" metrics, but especially have very different cycles: big customer satisfaction metrics like J. D. Power are big annual things, not quarterly reports like earnings. In my experience things like "how often are we calling the same disinterested people to the point where it starts to feel like very personal spam" metrics don't ever really get prioritized in internal reports unless there's enforcement from Legal departments, and even then Legal departments can't "upset the bottom line" and only care about such compliance when it becomes News and/or Lawsuits, both of which don't even merit even an annual review cycle. (In fact, the modern class action lawsuit pretty effectively prevents that feedback mechanism from cycling, because generally the terms of agreement in a settled class action lawsuit is that the class is no longer allowed to sue again for the same problem, even if the same problem keeps happening and is never actually fixed.)
Unless quarterly earnings reports need to include things like client satisfaction and spam tracking, the only metric management will continue to care about, because it also is the only metric shareholders claim to ever care about, is the "bottom line", no matter how ugly the sausage is made to bump it from quarter to quarter.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pissed off that Android took over the power button to activate their AI agent bullshit.
Google, not Android. I assure you, the Android Open Source Project made no such change.
Feeling rather flippant, but what's the difference in practice? Can you point to an AOSP "brand" phone on a store shelf that is "de-Googled" out of the box?
What is AOSP really for other than "open source washing" Google's ecosystem? Is it ever making standards that Google has to follow/comply with or is it always just the tail being wagged by the dog to make it look like the dog is happy about open source (but still isn't majority open source)?
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
The positive viewpoint is basically like the Industrial Revolution or the post-WWII consumer/convenience boom. If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth. It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure. Of course the reality for t…
Industrial revolution was pretty much disaster for average workers. It took a lot of literal fights till things got better.
Decades. It took decades. My understanding is a lot of historians see the first decades as major economic growth while most British people actually became smaller and shorter due to malnutrition.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the "research" you're getting from the AI is also low-quality content. And particularly susceptible to the X-Y problem because unless you're already learned in a subject you won't even know how to craft the prompt to get the answer you're looking for.
It really isn't. I'm not talking PhD grade R&D, I'm talking about everyday queries that take a long time manually and are easily automated with AI. Without going into details, I have used AI to find genuine, provably effective solutions to multiple real world problems that would either have been impossible without AI or would have taken a very, very long time. And it would have been a boon if it had been around while…
A pattern I have seen repeatedly for the last year is people who assert this, then have a problem and come to me/people like me for help, only to find that the basic research they did was complete garbage.
AI is very, very good at spitting out language. It's very, very bad at ascertaining the quality or correctness of the language it spits out.
And the problem with plausibly correct output is that sometimes it's good enough until it isn't, which is the pattern of behavior I've seen with heavy AI driven research.
I'm not going to discount that it's better than google searches. But it's hardly good enough to equate to undergraduate understanding. The act of reading and writing from primary/secondary sources crafted by humans is in itself the way to acquire and retain knowledge. Having it hallucinated at you in a plausibly correct way is dangerous to equate to that.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google, not Android. I assure you, the Android Open Source Project made no such change.
Feeling rather flippant, but what's the difference in practice ? Can you point to an AOSP "brand" phone on a store shelf that is "de-Googled" out of the box? What is AOSP really for other than "open source washing" Google's ecosystem? Is it ever making standards that Google has to follow/comply with or is it always just the tail being wagged by the dog to make it look like the dog is happy about open source (but stil…
LineageOS, GrapheneOS et al base themselves upon this upstream project.
A good one to familiarize yourself with, and support.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#497This 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…
Not to mention how many features that used to work have been summarily broken with no indication on whether we'll ever get them back, due to the wholesale replacement of previous functions with LLM-driven functions.
I can't even press the "favorite" button for my google photos on my google home device any more. It just says "I don't have access to photos" whether I use the button or voice (both of which obviously used to work).
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#498>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…
But what if the difference is either talking to an AI now, and the chances are fair that it can resolve my problem vs. staying on the line for a real person, who may be better able to help me, but there is a 2 hours wait (not an exaggeration, Hawaiian Airlines made me wait this long). Suddenly the former doesn't look that bad?
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#499>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…
What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest
Money. Often employees are the largest cost center.
The same people who liked outsourcing customer service to cheaper countries are of course going to love doing the same to AI
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it's reputation even matter? Everyone with money is pushing it, heavily. The government is even stepping in to stop any kind of punishment when it's factually shown that they are stealing water. The people will learn to tolerate it whether they like it or not, eventually.
The data center roll-out is weird, and far beyond anything that can be justified rationally. But this administration is aggressively pro-grift and anti-reality, so I would suspect that's as likely to be about some kind of corruption/grift/Ponzi as about real capability. I try to distinguish between the actual tech, which spans light and dark, and the financial and economic engineering around it, which is definitely a…
Even describing the tech as light and dark seems a stretch, it exists solely due to the wholesale theft of virtually all copyrighted works in existence. Where would Ai be if they had to aquire every scrap of training data legally and with the informed consent (not legalese buried in esoteric terms of service documents) of everyone who created it?