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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

#571
post #469

>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 went through the text logs for ours and it was all: "Fuck off and pass me to a human" and stuff like that. No one wants this who's calling you. We are literally damaging our company with it.

> "Fuck off and pass me to a human"

Honestly, I have uttered those same words when dealing with an offshored call centre.

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

#572
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…

I mean I did data science and ML (more the engineering part) back when it was popular, and I kinda echo those sentiments.

ML folks told me their methods would only outperform traditional ones if we could feed the training pipelines an order of magnitude more data than we had. And if a process we're trying to predict only produces X amount of data over a meaningful timeframe, getting 10x, or 100x the amount usually requires 'lateral thinking', which even at the best of times meant either building mass-survelliance into the product or pulling in tangential data, to get marginally better results at best.

What actually worked was understanding what data we had, what it meant, what we missed, and after gathering that right information, even the simplest mathematical tools yielded results.

They still ended feeding the entire thing into 'fancy algorithm X' from scikit-learn, crunched the numbers on those fancy GPUs and got a 5% better result than what the simple methods gave us.

It was still framed as the triumph of these fancy algorithms and expensive data scientists and not people with domain expertise working hard to find and get the right data.

I'm not even salty at this point, I'm just kinda disappointed that a big org has such a hard time doing the right thing for the right reasons.

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

#573

"Why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or services." - Steve Jobs from https://youtu.be/XbkMcvnNq3g?si=8Y56TFmKHJhlFXoE&t=364

"Just avoid holding it in that way."

- Steve Jobs

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

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they don't even want to try the thing, they are allegedly proud of, I would expect them to actually now, that the thing is garbage.

They're proud of their quarterly results, not of the product, that they couldn't care less about. They're not Steve Jobs types. They're glorified bean counters.

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

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're proud of their quarterly results, not of the product, that they couldn't care less about. They're not Steve Jobs types. They're glorified bean counters.

For many of them, the quarterly results are the product. Thanks to Milton Friedman, far too much of the manager class now believe that the end goal of their job is to make shareholders rich, and the fact that they have to do that by making a product or providing a service is something along the lines of a necessary evil.

Agreed. And the most horrible thing is, if the numbers do go up, they can actually feel justified.

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

#576
Everyone here be like "Hell yaeh! AI bad!"

But do ordinary people care? They can claim its a turnoff but does it actually make a difference to the bottom line? Skimming thru the article, it doesnt seem so.

People can complain all they want, just like they complain about ads but never use an ad blocker

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

#577
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right lmao. delusional

We live in AI Era. This is a new industrial revolution.

I wonder if the original industrial revolution was annoying in the same way with brands saying powered by steam engine when it wasn't a good solution?

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

#578
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

> the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI I had to call Geico's claims department yesterday and their AI customer service agent had a surfer bro accent, said "no worries" and "hang tight" and "I gotchu" while trying to follow-up on my claim which made it even more infuriating to interact with. Like... stop with the affectations and fake trying to be hip just be professional and succinct please!

Hitchhiker's Guide being prophetic again with its Genuine People Personalities.

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

#579
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extra odd socks I have the opposite issue, can generative washing recover the lost odd socks somehow?

Common misconception, the socks you think you're losing are being found by other people's washers.

Ah, the laundry operates in L-space.

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

#580

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.

>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…

Agreed, but it still appeals to investors because it promises to concentrate more money and power in the hands of those who own the hardware that runs the LLMs.
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