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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

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh fucking hell yes, how much I hate that shit. Bring back the "press 5 for XYZ" phone trees, I never have problems getting the systems to understand what I'm trying to indicate there.

I definitely prefer phone trees the ai agents. Something that has never made sense to me is why we even need most of the phone trees. Could they not just have separate numbers? Billing is X num. CS is Y num. Save the human species minutes for every fucking call. I realize the decision makers have been prioritizing the opposite. Making calls take as long as possible but I have no idea what is incentivizing them to do…

Phone numbers cost money, and customers now have to look up 5 different numbers and will inevitably call the wrong number…. Have to wait, get the right number, then call and wait again?

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

#552

I have yet to see AI being successfully onboarded in brands where I feel it actually benefits me. QuickBooks has annoying suggestions that shift the whole UI and cannot be disabled. Misclicks now happen. The AI in my robot vacuum is... just a label? I don't want to talk to it. I want it to deterministically clean my stuff. My TV got an upgrade to Gemini. Why? I don't talk to the TV, and it's in my face. (I'm think ab…

Funny, because my LG TV had Google Assistant (whatever that is) when I bought it, but it was removed. It was never in your face though, just a button on the remote.

It still has Alexa (it has both) but I never use it. I barely use the Echo that's next to the TV!

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

#553
post #290

Earlier 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.

Yeah it’s easy for people now to say “Look how great the Industrial Revolution was for us, the descendants of the people who didn’t die of cholera in an overcrowded tenement” and assume the Luddites were wrong on the impact on them, but that’s an over simplification

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

#554
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They don't use their own product, and they don't want their engineers to use their product either. They want velocity , and you can't have velocity if you're bogged down by doing end-to-end testing and finding friction and whatnot.

  > They want velocity
They keep using that word, but like so many words they use it's clear they don't know what it means. They're chasing speed, not velocity

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

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nazis are fine, but touchscreens aren't" seems like a weird place to draw the line, but I guess it's good that you have one at all.

Sus username

You're old enough to get the reference, but then maybe you had an i/PowerMac at the time and wouldn't.

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

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is not cost reduction. AI is not cheap. I think it is mimetic and FOMO driven, they think the press release packed with em dashes will 10x their stock price or something.

it's cheaper than hiring/training/providing benefits and career growth to real humans, at least for now

The ecological achievement of AI was to take the organic fertilizer out of enshittification and turn it into pure sunk cost! Stay tuned for whether it was wind turbines or nuclear..

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

#557

>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…

I am not a fan of AI agents when used poorly either, but this quote is a bit of a logical trap. No customer or user wakes up and says "I hope I get to talk to a human customer service agent today" either. Having to contact customer service at all is already a friction point. If AI or a human or a monkey pulling levers can fix my problem quickly, I don't really care. It's when my qualm is unable to be solved quickly that I will start finding flaws in the process - and because humans lack empathy for machines, it's easy to blame the machine rather than the process.

AI being used to advertise a brand is a different story - absolutely it comes across as insincere and lazy.

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

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but like.. talking to a chatbot is like the most un-nerdy in spirit thing you can do next to playing football. Nerds are, imo, attracted to esoteric complexity, long bouts of focused, actual, solitude getting to the bottom of the something. it's why they are stereotypically socially misadjusted sometimes. A "dork" is someone who likes AI a lot I think... They usually revolve more around a product or brand, and f…

I don't think you're familiar with the current state of AI tools then.

I'm sure you're writing lots of yaml files or whatever but it will never touch the kind of obsession and commitment any nerd had pouring over a DnD manual.

Either way, by it's very nature AI is about helping you do something else right? Its not the thing, its the means to do something else. It's just a totally different spirit and set of incentives imo.

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

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overall economics are wildly different. Radio didn't pay much, but it was promotion for the album. Spotify doesn't pay much, and it _replaces_ the album.

CD sales didn't pay much, because it all went to the labels.

A million album sales generates $2-3m for the artist under a typical label deal.

150,000,000 streams typically generates $560k _before_ the label cut.

Your posts make clear that you're a wildly immoral person -- not just because you repeatedly lie and distort to defend your position -- but the crux of your argument is "artists had a mediocre deal, so it is fine that the new deal is dramatically worse".

There's no way to respond to that.

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

#560

>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…

The ever dreaded automated phone systems are more tolerable than the AI driven phone systems. The press 1 for... never tried to make you think someone was actually listening to you, yet the AI services are made to come across like you are talking to a human. Don't try to make people think it's a human.

I agree. These days, automated voice response systems are actually less stressful.
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