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Study: Consumers Actively Turned Off by AI

182 points by 12_throw_away 2y ago

Animats 2y ago
LLMs have solved the problem of blithering at scale. Unfortunately, this mostly benefits advertisers.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  It hasn't even gotten as uncanny as it could be yet. Somebody must be fast-tracking straight to enshittification.
- eightman 2y ago
  The use case for AI is spam.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
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danpalmer 2y ago
Important clarification: consumers are turned off by AI marketing material. I'd be interested to see real studies into consumer satisfaction with AI features in existing products. My gut feeling is that people don't like (visible) AI in things they use, but that's biased by me reading online reporting about the failings of these features, I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them.
- afarviral 2y ago
  I tend to agree. If you asked about a feature which uses some kind of ML under the hood to deliver that feature you'd different results. I think companies should urgently pull back on mentioning AI at all if they want any credibility at this point.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Yup. "do you like that you can search for a name in your photo album" will get different answers then asking about AI.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - ksaj 2y ago
      That is a problem with Facebook, where people can tag you in images, even if you don't notice or approve it (you can opt out, but that's the opposite of what is optimal). Funny to see that come up again, but in a different context.
      - viraptor 2y ago
        There's lots of different implementations. For example Immich (https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/) is fully self-hosted and does local recognition. It doesn't have to be an online service stealing your data.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      That was never previously marketed as 'AI', though (I suspect because when CV started seeing this sort of application, the memory of the _previous_ AI winter was still fairly fresh, so everyone carefully avoided the term). In marketing, 'AI' tends to mean _generative_ AI these days.
- wokwokwok 2y ago
  > I'd be interested to see real studies into consumer satisfaction with AI features in existing products mmm... I guess.... I mean, a feature that is not 'obviously AI' is just a feature; even if you normalized it against 'normal' features with no AI as part of them, surely the deviance from random noise would be negligible? In a double blind test, you would have three cohorts; control, placebo and treatment (ie. AI). Since the placebo and treatment groups would receive the same feature with or without AI, you'd be looking at absolutely nothing meaningful in the data you collect. > I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them. How can users POSSIBLY have a positive / negative / ANY KIND of meaningful response to a feature based on the unknown backend implementation? If you put a chatGPT interface on your product and don't put an AI label on it, I guess most people, not being completely stupid, will not meaningfully distinguish between it and the equivalent feature with "Artificial Intelligence" painted on the side. An AI chat bot is an AI chat bot. You're not fooling anyone by calling it an 'intelligent assistant' instead of 'chatGPT'. :P I mean, I'm just guessing, you could study it. ...but, I guess it's probably not worth bothering. It's probably more likely the take-away here is: Make your product amazing; if it uses AI, hide that fact that it uses AI if you can.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    > would receive the same feature with or without AI, I'm not sure how you'd do that, given many features wouldn't exist without AI. We don't know how to implement them that way. The only existing choices are "no feature" and "AI feature".
- amluto 2y ago
  I am certainly turned off by “AI” customer support. The ones I’ve encountered are actively terrible, and I’d rather click through a tree of first-level fix-it-yourself advice than get walked through it by a stunningly poor AI. But sure, it would be spiffy if Siri was more capable, as long as it didn’t become susceptible to injection attacks from my photo album in the process…
  - ksaj 2y ago
    When The Weather Network first included an AI chat function, one of their sample questions was about stargazing. I asked the exact same question to see what kind of response it would give, and it said that it couldn't answer because weather does not affect star gazing. Really? I took a screencap, because this was such an epic example of why companies should actually test things before giving public access to them.
    - Piskvorrr 2y ago
      Can you actually test a component that is, by design, a black box? ("by design" of the current models. Yes, the systems could be re-made traceable. But then it would also turn out on how much pirated material the LLM has trained, and hoo boy would the IP lawyers show up. That's the con: "if it's a blackbox, you can't prove whence the corpus, nyah nyah!")
      - sensanaty 2y ago
        Our "testing" involves sending it 50 prompts and seeing if it bullshits too much and revising the prompt until it bullshits to acceptable levels. I suspect that's how the model makers test it as well, just fling crap at the wall and see which wall lets the most crap slide off of it (but never all of it)
        ksaj 2y ago
        This is called Fuzzing. And it is a major component of software testing. Especially in infosec, but I digress. The reasoning behind it is exactly the same.
- DelightOne 2y ago
  Every time I hear it contains AI it sounds like the features' outcome will be uncertain. Especially with more experience. If your feature were good you wouldn't have to mention AI to show it is awesome. More than not AI is used as an excuse for the feature to be bad.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- keybored 2y ago
  Okay then at what point do the users become reliable narrators? The AI cheerleaders can take comfort in that AI is in the hands of the average person now—but they also have to contend with any negative reactions as well. AI isn’t some behind the scenes technology (any more). And companies with their “AI” gimmick often highlight it with a star or something. People can chat with these things as easily as doing a Google search.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  I'd buy that people like "AI" features writ large; automatic image classification on your phone, say. However, I'm not convinced anyone much likes the existing applications of LLMs (mostly terrible obstructive chatbots, and blogspam).
senectus1 2y ago
I sat in on a weekly MS meeting where they spruik their products a few days ago. AI/CoPilot/Chat-GPT was mentioned 100 times in the 34 mins I was in it. ( I was tallying, cause I'm sick of it) And thats not including text on the presentation. just the times the words were said.
- afarviral 2y ago
  Did you tell the CEO? Tell the prick.
feverzsj 2y ago
AI is still far from profitable, except for scam.
Quothling 2y ago
> they found that products described as using AI were consistently less popular. Branding the mistakes LLM's get as hallucinations was sort of brilliant in my opinion, it was a good way to disguise the fact that LLM's are mostly just really lucky. In my anecdotal experience it hasn't worked out too well though, so maybe it wasn't that brilliant? Anyway, parts of how the AI impacts our business (solar energy + investment banking) has been through things like how Microsoft Teams was supposed to be capable of transcripting meetings with AI. Now, we're an international organisation where English is at best the second language for people, and usually the third, so this probably has an impact on it, but it's so bad. I know I'm not personally the clearest speaker, especially if I'm bored, but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously bad that they often become the foundation for the weekly friday meme in IT. Which may be innocent enough, but it hasn't been very confidence building in the higher ups who thought they wouldn't have to have someone write a summary for their meetings, and in typical top brass style didn't read the transcripts until there was some contract issue. This along with how often AI "hallucinates" has meant that our top decision makers have decided to stop any AI within the Microsoft platform. Well every thing except the thing that makes power point presentations pretty. So our operations staff has had to roll back co-pilot for every non-IT employee. I don't necessarily agree with this myself, I use GPT quite a lot and while github co-pilot might "just" be fancy auto-complete it's still increased my productivity quite a lot as well as lowering my mental load of dealing with most snippets. That isn't how the rest of the organisation sees it though, they see the mistakes AI makes on areas where no-mistakes are allowed, and they consider it untrustworthy. The whole Microsoft debacle (I used chatGPT to tell me how to write "debaclable") where they wanted to screenshot everything all the time really sunk trust with our decision makers.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously bad They improve significantly with microphone quality. I have a professional voice recording setup I use with Teams and the transcripts are usually around 90% accurate. A tool like AWS transcribe tends to get 95% on my voice work.
- tssge 2y ago
  >but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously My experience on AI transcripts is different: I use auto (AI) generated captions on YouTube for every video and while there sure are some mistakes with especially names and specialized words, in general it is highly understandable. So much so that that I miss the auto generated captions when they're not available. Even if real captions are available, on occasion I have to swap out from the human made captions to the auto generated AI captions, because believe it or not in some cases the AI generated captions are actually better with less mistakes! I find that rather impressive from the AIs side.
zacksiri 2y ago
I wonder if the same sentiment applies to products using .ai TLDs. The thing about AI is it reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about speeds and fees. People care about "1000 songs in your pocket" not "30GB hdd". AI seems to be the "30GB hdd" and people don't always relate AI to how it's going to help them.
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  Every time I see a .ai TLD I just assume it's owned by a grifter. It saves time. *shrug*
- ksaj 2y ago
  We keep saying "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" while forgetting that technology only becomes good when we don't think about the technology anymore. It works like magic. How many users know the difference between MFM and RLL hard drives? Now keep progressing that technology wise. People only know and care that they got bigger and faster. Do users care that the file system may or may not be self-defragging?
- wasteduniverse 2y ago
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rsi_triad 2y ago
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- vmfunction 2y ago
  The analogy between AI and Adult Diapers is not too far off.
ksaj 2y ago
They're turned off on the lingo showing up everywhere, regardless of its relevance (or lack thereof). It's similar to when the Internet first started becoming commercial, and people were revolted by terms like "information superhighway" etc being thrown around so excessively. Eventually everybody grew into it, and we can't imagine life without the Internet. AI is having that same moment right now. The breathless hype bombardment will eventually give way to normalcy just the same.
- Piskvorrr 2y ago
  ...as soon as as the hype wave recedes, and vendors stop sticking the current-hot label onto everything. "MOUSE WITH AI" (*with a button that opens a browser window, how very innovative. But wait, it's a browser window pointed to an AI assistant!!!)
  - ksaj 2y ago
    Guitar players know this as well. A lot of pedals and DAW (digital audio workstation) plugins electronically mimic old analog hardware. Everyone claims the software version is crap, not realizing just how much of their favourite music is using it. I saw an interview with Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) and right behind him was a rack with a Pod Pro amp simulator. I recognized it because I have one, and indeed, you can easily dial in his tone and typical amp sounds. But I'm left wondering how many Sabbath fans noticed that he's using digital modeling these days, or if they can even tell when he started doing that. People don't like change. It takes a lot of marketing hype to create motion for change to happen. And most people won't even notice it happen. Just like with Sabbath albums.
    - TheRoque 2y ago
      Poorly used generative AI is obvious to spot though
  - BlobberSnobber 2y ago
    The logitech app has a chatbot for some god-forsaken reason
samdung 2y ago
In just a few months every website that has had a customer support chat-plugin seems to have become 'AI Powered'. And all they seem to do is go on in a circular drivel.
- sensanaty 2y ago
  I work for a company providing those kind of solutions and yeah, the mandate from above is that we need to build an AI bot that will replace real human CS agents. The "vision" from our CEO is that he wants to replace 95% of all human interactions with the bot, to which the dev team in unison exclaimed "what the fuck?". It's literally just calling the OpenAI APIs with some overly complex system prompt. It is laughably useless, constantly lies, but some of our bigger (read: soul-less corpo) customers love it because they can get rid of a portion of their CS team even further than they've already been doing. From what I've noticed, it's mostly marketers, spammers/scammers, and the C-level and their investor buddies that are excited about AI, and the not-so-cynic in me can't see it for anything else other than a way for them to fire people en-masse to make more money by automating their jobs away, regardless of if the quality is horrendous or not. I think we're already reaching a point where regular people are kind of sick of all the AI shit, though. Who knows, maybe people start abandoning anything that smells of AI en-masse? It's nice to dream, anyway.
sensanaty 2y ago
Once you look past the initial reaction of "oh cool a computer can do this!?" You quickly start running into the limitations. And if you're in a product team building some AI feature (aka calling an OpenAI API 90% of the time), you realize even more how laughably useless it is in actuality. For example Notion. They have an AI feature, and it's hilariously useless. It can barely even summarize things, yet alone write the rest of the document for you. Yet they push it constantly onto you with no way of disabling the crap. What I have noticed is that the marketing people are in love with it, because it lets them generate the useless drivel they spam people with easier than before. I suspect they never used their brains much, but now they don't even have to at all! Coincidentally, scammers also love it for similar reasons...
- fhd2 2y ago
  Same here. I know a number of sales and marketing people that just _won't_ shut up about ChatGPT, trying to get me to use it more the way it's useful to them. I know for a fact that there's nothing in it for them promoting it to me, they're honestly just in love. They do use it to write drivel. They write promotional posts, mass emails and LinkedIn requests, briefs for their conferences and events... The typing speed of one of these guys was about two words per minute, ChatGPT probably really does save him hours. I noticed he mostly uses voice input. When I say stuff like I want to think about what points to make he'd get confused, he'd just ask ChatGPT what points he could make. He doesn't even think about that part anymore. I can certainly see how those kinds of people will push product teams to integrate assistant features and happily promote them. It really does seem to be life changing for them. Personally, I can't relate though.
EdwardDiego 2y ago
The fact that every C-suite in America simultaenously decided "We need AI in our product. Look, just jam it in somehow, you'll make it fit" is, I'm sure, unrelated. AI is a keyword for investors currently, that's all. Like all the companies that previously sprouted a blockchain unrelated to their core product.
- kreyenborgi 2y ago
  I've even seen AI being used as an argument for destroying more wilderness in order to build power plants – so we can "stay ahead of the AI revolution with green power", just like at some point blockchain was.
- sensanaty 2y ago
  https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24 Someone else linked it above, but after seeing this, yeah no wonder people are getting tired of it. Basically every single company in the batch mentions AI.
mrtksn 2y ago
Just an anecdote but I had a small mobile app that would make people pay money for the premium features, and (surprising for me) many people happily paid. Although the app had very positive reviews, it wasn't growing fast enough to make it into a meaningful income. So I told myself, why don't I add AI stuff on it like an AI assistant as a primary way of interaction? Everyone loves AI, it's the future! Then the app retention tanked, as well as the install numbers and no purchase was made after that. People didn't even bother with leaving bad reviews. Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it. Like the artificial sweeteners maybe? "0 calories and the same taste with the sugar? Why would anybody ever use sugar again, right? Lets short the sugar cane and corn fields and put all our money into artificial sweeteners production equipment and chemicals"
- frde_me 2y ago
  > Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it. I think everyone is tired of conversing with a chatbot over text by now. But there are ways of integrating AI without making the primary interactions a pain. I'm also a bit puzzled by why people think it's a good idea in the first place Using a chatbox as a way to do primary interactions? Nope. But use that same AI to quickly summarize reviews for a product into a digestible format that I can easy glance at, or ignore? That last one actually saves me time, and doesn't harm my user experience, so why not?
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    I agree, IMHO people don't like to interact with AI, but they love it when the tedious work is done by AI. The interaction part is cool at first until your curiosity about the tech itself vanishes. The current AI tech has some very useful use cases and its here to stay but its not replacing human interaction or the Human-Computer interface as I previously believed. The AI pin, Rabbit and who knows who else failed in attempting to replace human interactions or screen UI with speech or text. Chatbots look so deceivingly capable but they are completely useless when it comes holding authority and trust. Every real human will always provide you with accurate information best to their knowledge and when they fail on it(sometimes in bad faith) its considered a big deal and can lead to anything from being angry with to not trusting that person ever again(therefore ignoring that person when possible) and in some cases imprisonment of the person. AI lying is too cheap to warrant a human interaction. It's pure waste of time when it comes to doing anything consequential.
tauntz 2y ago
Anecdotal evidence but my reaction to seeing a Google product release mentioning anything related "Gemini AI" makes me subconsciously assume that they made the product worse by including a totally unrelated and barely working feature that nobody asked for. The only reason for most of these features is, I assume, that there's a requirement now for all PMs to ship something with "Gemini AI" in its title or they won't get a promotion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- gwervc 2y ago
  The good thing is that going by Google track record, the feature will live only a few years.
charlieyu1 2y ago
Not surprising at all, there is a big trend of using AI for cutting costs while producing stuff with minimal quality. Once the initial hype is over, the consumers will hate how repetitive it is.
- ksaj 2y ago
  The cost is currently offloaded to the AI providers. OpenAI is apperently burning cash like crazy, in that their revenue is far lower than their expenses. For now, during its formative years anyway. Once the initial hype is over, we will just take it for granted that the software we're using is doing something with AI. The costs will have to either be solved, or flipped to the consumer, though. Right now, it's a free-for-all, and worth taking advantage of, if you can.
HPsquared 2y ago
I think it's the association with "AI-generated slop content". People associate the use of AI in an existing area as being a poor-quality facsimile of the real thing, whatever the "real thing" is. That, or an unnecessary addition causing annoyance (aka Clippy) On the other hand, for genuinely new use-cases where AI is central and beneficial, I'd be surprised if there was a negative reaction. It is "new shiny thing" vs "cheap plastic imitation". Reminds me of The Graduate "One word. Plastics."
- amrocha 2y ago
  There are no genuinely new use cases for AI
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    High speed of generating content is new.
    - pona-a 2y ago
      SEO have farms existed previously, and as far as I can tell, their unwilling consumers weren't really asking for more at higher bandwidth but with even less accuracy.
      - HPsquared 2y ago
        For one predefined type of content maybe, but not on the kind of quality and versatility that appeared in the last year or two. You couldn't just randomly say "hey Google, code me up a PowerShell script that does x, y and z" and have a back-and-forth discussion. This is completely new.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      But the content is _bad_. Nobody, or virtually nobody, wants an increased supply of bad content. There's already far more than enough of that.
ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
It's this simple: generative AI is poisoning culture. Everyone knows this -- even the people pushing it. We know what it is doing to art, what it is doing to just being able to find a book on amazon, what it is doing to reviews, to website searches, to authenticity everywhere. Splitting hairs about whether people think it's the terminology or the functionality is absurd. Stop making generative AI products that are the cultural equivalent of breaking into the community pool solely to piss in it. People don't really want this. They have an instinct that a lot of AI products are little more than grift (trained by their experiences with "Web 3.0"). And this study is showing that.
- krapp 2y ago
  The only thing that is going to stop generative AI is companies using it not making as much money as they expected. It's probably going to take a crash and another AI winter. Maybe I'm too blackpilled on AI already but I absolutely believe companies will just keep throwing money at it until it's literally existentially impossible to do so, just because the promise of the capitalist version of free energy (delusional as it may be) is just too great to resist. The degree to which our culture is already largely controlled and manufactured by corporations and sold to us without our input or consent is a separate conversation we should have, collectively, because AI is just pissing harder into an already pissed in pool in that regard.
  - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
    > because AI is just pissing harder into an already pissed in pool in that regard. It is, and I agree. But I suspect you agree with me that this is not how people feel. If you see someone lying on the street, bloodied, and you don't help, expect to be judged by that person about as harshly as they judge the person who beat them up. Corporate culture has never come for art and writing as dismissively and callously as generative AI does. This isn't pop stars and TV. This is coming to the artist who has self-taught oil paintings, the photographer who has built their own artistic camera, the pencil sketch artist who has learned photorealistic sketching and saying "hey, I know your work is almost impossible to share with people already and sharing it is the thing that makes you feel good... but I'm going to make that worse by drowning it in autogenerated shit. Oh and hey, you know how you developed a style and sold a couple of things? I've trained my system so that your customers can just generate work in your style without even giving you money, so that should make you happy, right? Happy customers are good." This is not a mere extension of corporate culture. This is a callous, systematically careless, dismissive kick in the face to people on the ground. And we all feel it, either on our own behalf as creative people, or for those artists we admire.
ogou 2y ago
I travel often in Europe and see these AI assistants on many websites and apps now. Two things generally happen when I have tried to use them. First, nothing actionable is possible. They can't actually do anything. No trip changes, refunds, connections, or baggage tracing. It takes a significant amount of time to get to to the response, "Sorry I can't help with that, please call xxx during business hours or visit our website at xxx." Second, they invariably end up as marketing funnels with upsells offered in place of solutions. I see that as the main source of anger from others in airports. They try to deal with something and end up in marketing loops. When I see AI assistance as a travel feature I assume it is not only going to be useless, but actively disruptive to my experience.
- Nursie 2y ago
  “Yet another layer I have to fight through before I can speak to someone who may actually be able to do something useful” Yup.
Lerc 2y ago
This does not surprise me, this is a new technology that people are wary of. People are far more aware of marketing techniques these days an know that when a device is advertised as having trendy feature X, it probably doesn't have anything to do with the meaningful aspects of the feature. Consider how many atomic themed products there were in the 60's. We can be thankful that the only way most of these were actually atomic is in that they were made of atoms. The naivety if those days has gone. Information (true or not) travels so quickly now , everyone is a bit jaded. Many are outright nihilistic. It's worth noting that people's opinion of AI in product is distinct to the actual AI itself. I'm not in a position to find the reference right now, but I remember reading about a study which showed people felt that when given artworks to judge, the ones they were told were by AI were inferior. This was independent from whether or not each piece was actually by an AI or a human.
perlgeek 2y ago
I'd love to see more products use some machine learning in ways that fit their current UI paradigms. For example: * You enter an ambiguous search term into a search engine. It shows you some results, but it also shows you some buttons to filter by meaning. For example if you've entered "universal", it could give you an option to filter out all pages where "universal" appears as the name of the film studio, without a hack like excluding "universal films", but actually deciding based on context * If you've touched up a few photos the same way, an image processing program could give you a suggestion for a touch-up for the next photo, along with options to tweak it * In an email program, if you've moved a few emails to a folder, it could suggest a selection of other emails to move to the same folder, or maybe suggest to you a mail rule that would do it for you in future. ... and please, provide an option to switch it off.
fch42 2y ago
There is value way beyond the immediate service given in a human to human interaction; we're social animals after all and tend to derive a form of pleasure out of "being with others". In the same sense that granny went praying the rosaries Saturday evening before mass, because that also got her the coffee and cake with her friends ahead of that, and the chats afterwards. Just like the person at the till chatting with the cashier, the person talking to the surgery's receptionist (and not just about booking in the doc), or the talk with the pharmacist about how and when best to take the prescription medicine (and since we meet monthly for that anyway ... give me the gossip and the events in town as well) - this used to happen because, quite frankly, "efficient" communication and "efficient" human to human interaction is not what we seek. It'd be rude. And that's where the whole chatbot, AI or no, thing falls a little. No matter how smarmy or even actually helpful that chat thing is, it doesn't shake my hand, won't do me favours, probably not take me to the shops after work, and ask me whether I need help or why I look sad. Nor complement me on my eyes. I don't know; at least in me, the herd animal roars loudly enough that I feel unvalued whenever I am forced to interact non-physically. The distance can be felt. And to me, that is not a "protective distance" but an "excluding" one. Makes me more lonely.
- latentnumber 2y ago
  Exactly. Beautifully written. Relatedly, a friend is working on an AI interviewer and when I tried her prototype, it felt extremely dehumanizing. "But it's efficient."
everdrive 2y ago
AI is being pushed everywhere, and I couldn't hate it more. I don't want an AI assistant. I don't want to "talk" to a computer. I don't want a company diving mindlessly into the next trend just because they're afraid of being left behind. As others have said, it's a sign that a company doesn't really know what it's doing. I hear executives brag that they put all their emails through an AI assistant. This just tells me two things: they're apparently bad at articulating themselves, and no one is actually reading their emails.
- plasticeagle 2y ago
  "If you couldn't be bothered to write it - why should I be bothered to read it?" - Some Internet Wag. That's the thing, isn't it. AI output is so low-effort that it may as well not exist at all. Just send me the prompt instead, if you're going to do that.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    https://i.imgur.com/k1dIVRr.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/k1dIVRr.jpeg When an entire culture is built on constant pointless pretense, is it really surprising that there is considerable effort put into optimizing it?
KronisLV 2y ago
I really like something like GitHub Copilot and Copilot Chat, because they help with boilerplate and simple functions, as well as lower the barrier for doing some exploratory work and iterating. Something like Phind is even better in those cases where you care about looking into the actual sources that are returned, as opposed to just testing the output for your needs. I also like general purpose chat/writing/instruct models and they're a nice curiosity, even the image generation ones are nice for either some placeholder assets, texture work, or some sometimes goofy art. HuggingFace has some nice models and the stuff that people come up with on Civitai is sometimes cool! Video generation is really jank for now, I wonder where we'll be in 20 years. Overall, I'm positive about "AI", but maybe that's because I seek it out and use it as a tool, as opposed to some platform shoving it down my throat in the form of a customer service bot that just throws noise at me while having no actual power to do anything. There are use cases that are pleasant, also stuff like summarizing, text prediction, writing improvements, but there are also those that nobody asked for.
blibble 2y ago
AI becoming associated in consumers minds with cheap useless garbage is the best thing that could have happened AI is the shovelware wii game of the 2020s I wonder what this will do to the YC S24 batch... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24
- sensanaty 2y ago
  Wow, basically every single company there incorporates AI into their pitch or even name somehow... I mean I respect the grift I guess, but I'm not surprised in the least that people are quickly growing tired of it all. Some of the ideas I'm seeing on that list are just straight up idiotic, but since it leverages AI somehow it's suddenly a good idea, I guess...
- mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
  AI is the shovelware wii game of the 2020s Man, I wish shovelware games had been a temporary problem we grew out of. The Switch store is still riddled with them, and the PSN store has some obvious grift as well. All of the "Jumping <Food>" SKUs that are just achievement fodder, for example.
doodaddy 2y ago
As a term, “AI” has become synonymous with “new”. And “new” has become synonymous with “good”. We are in an age where age is a liability. If it’s not new it’s old, and old isn’t good. And it’s all sad because it’s simply not true. But marketing teams wide and far are pushing this narrative. And I think companies are encouraging their marketing teams to do it because it’s an easy way to dress up a half-baked product, hiding it behind a buzzword. But I don’t think it’s a signal to consumers as much as a signal to investors and competitors. Since when does the consumer care about which technology was used to build a product? Has a consumer ever said “wow this product is so good it must have been built with Rust!” The bottom line is it shouldn’t matter and it doesn’t. People need features, not technology, even though many of them confuse the two.
cchi_co 2y ago
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kebsup 2y ago
I'm building a flashcard language learning app, and the Meta ad with the phrase "AI-powered" performs better than all other variations, so depends.
- Scarblac 2y ago
  My first association with flash card apps is that it's extremely tedious to create the cards for what you're trying to memorize, so if AI can help with that, that may be worth it.
netcan 2y ago
I don't think it's disillusionment with the tech. Consumers barely touch the tech. It's disillusionment with the marketing I think this goes beyond just consumers. If you listen in on a random companies' strategic planning... Any project with "ai" in its title is likely to be bullschtick. "AI enabled" is our 2024 "now with electrolytes."
solarkraft 2y ago
It means unreliable. I saw an ad for a cool scheduling app. Once they mentioned it‘s „AI powered“ (why??) I started worrying about it randomly missing events.
poikroequ 2y ago
AI is not being marketed to consumers. AI is being marketed to investors.
dmd 2y ago
Logitech's *mouse driver* now has AI in it[0]. [0] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/software/logi-options-plus.html https://www.logitech.com/en-us/software/logi-options-plus.ht...
bfrog 2y ago
Yeah I’d rather not be part of the experiment thank you. If something takes intelligence to do I want to talk to a human that can help do it. AI isn’t going to magically help solve problems with technology. Frankly I’m tired of technology. I miss people.
peanut_worm 2y ago
AI just means “annoying chatbots and low quality content” to most people
tmpfs 2y ago
Think about trying to get customer service from any company now, we all end up talking to AI bots that don't actually help at all. No wonder the public perception is bad, our experience of AI is often based on these automated services which actually make our lives more frustrating.
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GuB-42 2y ago
Many consumers have a working bullshit detector. And they are starting to understand that "AI" is usually a meaningless buzzword. And people don't like being bullshitted. And even to those who think there is real meaning behind it, do you really think people want "intelligence" everywhere, artificial or not. People don't want their toaster to be intelligent, they just want it to toast. So what is an AI powered toaster? A toaster you have to argue with regarding how you want your bread toasted? And in many cases that's what happens when you replace a push button with an "AI assistant", so people are not wrong about it either.
indigo0086 2y ago
One thing I and probably many others notice about AI integration is it places incorrect operation on the user's plate. If the user gets a wrong answer, well just remember ai tends to do that. People are trying to find ways to make a truly intuitive ai interface that isn't just a text box you chat with. With adequate error recognition and correction integrating ai shouldn't be something the user notices other than the time it takes to process. This would be another issue as integrating ai just adds a time lag on those operations which can depress user sentiment in another way
snakeyjake 2y ago
As far as I can tell, AI is only useful for: 1. Making really, really, REALLY, shitty "art" 2. Writing nonsensical and boring short stories or bland written-by-committee memos that make you sound like a soulless AI 3. Creating summaries that are pathetic compared to the first paragraph of any wikipedia article on literally any topic (also, they are often 100% wrong) 4. Acting as a useless, actually worse that useless due to being both useless and time wasting, wall between you and a human who can actually do something "assistant" 5. Looking at images and telling me if there's a cat or a fruit in them 6. Being a worse chatbot than ELIZA was 50 years ago 7. Writing code that, if it is anything more complex than something you can copy and paste from Stack Overflow and have work, you have to spend more time fixing than if you had just written it yourself But it is very good at bombarding users with an infinite stream of garbage content that is cheap and effortless to create so it will eventually devour everything.
iainctduncan 2y ago
This is not at all suprisinging to me. In general, companies underestimate the intelligence of the consumer and are pretty bad at imagining being a consumer looking at their company. We are all being indundated with AI hype, and it's almost all telling companies "you can save money by getting AI to do a mediocre-to-ouright-shitty versions of this work instead of hiring people". As a consumer, why would I choose a company optimizing for their margins at the expense of my experience? Touting AI has become a warning sign that the company is doing this.
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n_ary 2y ago
For me personally, when I see "AI" suddenly popping up on something I am subscribed to, 8/10 times, there is some sort of chatbot suddenly added there; nothing ground breaking, nothing cool(that didn't exist before), just a random chatbot! Secondly, I am slightly burntout looking at all the "BlockChain", "distributed", "Crypto" for like last decade and now suddenly the same products(and products from same people) did a swap of "crypto" or "blockChain" with "AI". Needless to say, my mind is jaded from all those scammy blockchain peedlers that when I see an "AI" (e.g. TodoAI, like wtf? I just want to add some text and dates and want to check those when am done or just show me a notification if I forgot..), I just feel like someone is trying to scam me. Also, I noticed that some products suddenly hiked the price after adding the "AI" in their featureset, which wouldn't feel scammy(because inflation happened), but if I see some crappification of the product post AI, it just leaves a bad taste that next time I see anything with "AI" as feature, I assume it is also some crap. I know, don't judge a book by fathers and children must not be judged by deeds/sins of their fathers but what can I say. Also, most of the products are clearly proxying stuff to ChatGPT with a system prompt, you can actually sense it, if you have used OpenAI apis. Which causes me extra pain, because c'mon, you are selling me a proxy with a prompt and charging me like $5.99/month!
isleyaardvark 2y ago
It's quite simple. Consumers realize either consciously or not that saying "AI" means the added AI will make the product: 1. cheaper 2. worse It's invariably used as a cost-cutting measure that is quick, cheap, and worse. Companies use AI art because they are too cheap to hire a real artist that would make better art. Companies use AI chatbots because they are too cheap to hire real customer service agents who could actually help people. If a company slapped a label on a bag of chips that said "Now with fewer chips and less flavor!", I'm sure that would turn off consumers as well.

182 points by 12_throw_away 2y ago

Animats 2y ago

LLMs have solved the problem of blithering at scale. Unfortunately, this mostly benefits advertisers.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
It hasn't even gotten as uncanny as it could be yet. Somebody must be fast-tracking straight to enshittification.
eightman 2y ago
The use case for AI is spam.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

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danpalmer 2y ago

Important clarification: consumers are turned off by AI marketing material. I'd be interested to see real studies into consumer satisfaction with AI features in existing products. My gut feeling is that people don't like (visible) AI in things they use, but that's biased by me reading online reporting about the failings of these features, I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them.

afarviral 2y ago
I tend to agree. If you asked about a feature which uses some kind of ML under the hood to deliver that feature you'd different results. I think companies should urgently pull back on mentioning AI at all if they want any credibility at this point.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Yup. "do you like that you can search for a name in your photo album" will get different answers then asking about AI.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - ksaj 2y ago
    That is a problem with Facebook, where people can tag you in images, even if you don't notice or approve it (you can opt out, but that's the opposite of what is optimal). Funny to see that come up again, but in a different context.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      There's lots of different implementations. For example Immich (https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/) is fully self-hosted and does local recognition. It doesn't have to be an online service stealing your data.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    That was never previously marketed as 'AI', though (I suspect because when CV started seeing this sort of application, the memory of the _previous_ AI winter was still fairly fresh, so everyone carefully avoided the term). In marketing, 'AI' tends to mean _generative_ AI these days.
wokwokwok 2y ago
> I'd be interested to see real studies into consumer satisfaction with AI features in existing products mmm... I guess.... I mean, a feature that is not 'obviously AI' is just a feature; even if you normalized it against 'normal' features with no AI as part of them, surely the deviance from random noise would be negligible? In a double blind test, you would have three cohorts; control, placebo and treatment (ie. AI). Since the placebo and treatment groups would receive the same feature with or without AI, you'd be looking at absolutely nothing meaningful in the data you collect. > I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them. How can users POSSIBLY have a positive / negative / ANY KIND of meaningful response to a feature based on the unknown backend implementation? If you put a chatGPT interface on your product and don't put an AI label on it, I guess most people, not being completely stupid, will not meaningfully distinguish between it and the equivalent feature with "Artificial Intelligence" painted on the side. An AI chat bot is an AI chat bot. You're not fooling anyone by calling it an 'intelligent assistant' instead of 'chatGPT'. :P I mean, I'm just guessing, you could study it. ...but, I guess it's probably not worth bothering. It's probably more likely the take-away here is: Make your product amazing; if it uses AI, hide that fact that it uses AI if you can.
- viraptor 2y ago
  > would receive the same feature with or without AI, I'm not sure how you'd do that, given many features wouldn't exist without AI. We don't know how to implement them that way. The only existing choices are "no feature" and "AI feature".
amluto 2y ago
I am certainly turned off by “AI” customer support. The ones I’ve encountered are actively terrible, and I’d rather click through a tree of first-level fix-it-yourself advice than get walked through it by a stunningly poor AI. But sure, it would be spiffy if Siri was more capable, as long as it didn’t become susceptible to injection attacks from my photo album in the process…
- ksaj 2y ago
  When The Weather Network first included an AI chat function, one of their sample questions was about stargazing. I asked the exact same question to see what kind of response it would give, and it said that it couldn't answer because weather does not affect star gazing. Really? I took a screencap, because this was such an epic example of why companies should actually test things before giving public access to them.
  - Piskvorrr 2y ago
    Can you actually test a component that is, by design, a black box? ("by design" of the current models. Yes, the systems could be re-made traceable. But then it would also turn out on how much pirated material the LLM has trained, and hoo boy would the IP lawyers show up. That's the con: "if it's a blackbox, you can't prove whence the corpus, nyah nyah!")
    - sensanaty 2y ago
      Our "testing" involves sending it 50 prompts and seeing if it bullshits too much and revising the prompt until it bullshits to acceptable levels. I suspect that's how the model makers test it as well, just fling crap at the wall and see which wall lets the most crap slide off of it (but never all of it)
      - ksaj 2y ago
        This is called Fuzzing. And it is a major component of software testing. Especially in infosec, but I digress. The reasoning behind it is exactly the same.
DelightOne 2y ago
Every time I hear it contains AI it sounds like the features' outcome will be uncertain. Especially with more experience. If your feature were good you wouldn't have to mention AI to show it is awesome. More than not AI is used as an excuse for the feature to be bad.
- deleted 2y ago
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keybored 2y ago
Okay then at what point do the users become reliable narrators? The AI cheerleaders can take comfort in that AI is in the hands of the average person now—but they also have to contend with any negative reactions as well. AI isn’t some behind the scenes technology (any more). And companies with their “AI” gimmick often highlight it with a star or something. People can chat with these things as easily as doing a Google search.
rsynnott 2y ago
I'd buy that people like "AI" features writ large; automatic image classification on your phone, say. However, I'm not convinced anyone much likes the existing applications of LLMs (mostly terrible obstructive chatbots, and blogspam).

senectus1 2y ago

I sat in on a weekly MS meeting where they spruik their products a few days ago. AI/CoPilot/Chat-GPT was mentioned 100 times in the 34 mins I was in it. ( I was tallying, cause I'm sick of it) And thats not including text on the presentation. just the times the words were said.

afarviral 2y ago
Did you tell the CEO? Tell the prick.

feverzsj 2y ago

AI is still far from profitable, except for scam.

Quothling 2y ago

> they found that products described as using AI were consistently less popular. Branding the mistakes LLM's get as hallucinations was sort of brilliant in my opinion, it was a good way to disguise the fact that LLM's are mostly just really lucky. In my anecdotal experience it hasn't worked out too well though, so maybe it wasn't that brilliant? Anyway, parts of how the AI impacts our business (solar energy + investment banking) has been through things like how Microsoft Teams was supposed to be capable of transcripting meetings with AI. Now, we're an international organisation where English is at best the second language for people, and usually the third, so this probably has an impact on it, but it's so bad. I know I'm not personally the clearest speaker, especially if I'm bored, but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously bad that they often become the foundation for the weekly friday meme in IT. Which may be innocent enough, but it hasn't been very confidence building in the higher ups who thought they wouldn't have to have someone write a summary for their meetings, and in typical top brass style didn't read the transcripts until there was some contract issue. This along with how often AI "hallucinates" has meant that our top decision makers have decided to stop any AI within the Microsoft platform. Well every thing except the thing that makes power point presentations pretty. So our operations staff has had to roll back co-pilot for every non-IT employee. I don't necessarily agree with this myself, I use GPT quite a lot and while github co-pilot might "just" be fancy auto-complete it's still increased my productivity quite a lot as well as lowering my mental load of dealing with most snippets. That isn't how the rest of the organisation sees it though, they see the mistakes AI makes on areas where no-mistakes are allowed, and they consider it untrustworthy. The whole Microsoft debacle (I used chatGPT to tell me how to write "debaclable") where they wanted to screenshot everything all the time really sunk trust with our decision makers.

akira2501 2y ago
> but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously bad They improve significantly with microphone quality. I have a professional voice recording setup I use with Teams and the transcripts are usually around 90% accurate. A tool like AWS transcribe tends to get 95% on my voice work.
tssge 2y ago
>but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously My experience on AI transcripts is different: I use auto (AI) generated captions on YouTube for every video and while there sure are some mistakes with especially names and specialized words, in general it is highly understandable. So much so that that I miss the auto generated captions when they're not available. Even if real captions are available, on occasion I have to swap out from the human made captions to the auto generated AI captions, because believe it or not in some cases the AI generated captions are actually better with less mistakes! I find that rather impressive from the AIs side.

zacksiri 2y ago

I wonder if the same sentiment applies to products using .ai TLDs. The thing about AI is it reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about speeds and fees. People care about "1000 songs in your pocket" not "30GB hdd". AI seems to be the "30GB hdd" and people don't always relate AI to how it's going to help them.

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
Every time I see a .ai TLD I just assume it's owned by a grifter. It saves time. *shrug*
ksaj 2y ago
We keep saying "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" while forgetting that technology only becomes good when we don't think about the technology anymore. It works like magic. How many users know the difference between MFM and RLL hard drives? Now keep progressing that technology wise. People only know and care that they got bigger and faster. Do users care that the file system may or may not be self-defragging?
wasteduniverse 2y ago
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rsi_triad 2y ago

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vmfunction 2y ago
The analogy between AI and Adult Diapers is not too far off.

ksaj 2y ago

They're turned off on the lingo showing up everywhere, regardless of its relevance (or lack thereof). It's similar to when the Internet first started becoming commercial, and people were revolted by terms like "information superhighway" etc being thrown around so excessively. Eventually everybody grew into it, and we can't imagine life without the Internet. AI is having that same moment right now. The breathless hype bombardment will eventually give way to normalcy just the same.

Piskvorrr 2y ago
...as soon as as the hype wave recedes, and vendors stop sticking the current-hot label onto everything. "MOUSE WITH AI" (*with a button that opens a browser window, how very innovative. But wait, it's a browser window pointed to an AI assistant!!!)
- ksaj 2y ago
  Guitar players know this as well. A lot of pedals and DAW (digital audio workstation) plugins electronically mimic old analog hardware. Everyone claims the software version is crap, not realizing just how much of their favourite music is using it. I saw an interview with Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) and right behind him was a rack with a Pod Pro amp simulator. I recognized it because I have one, and indeed, you can easily dial in his tone and typical amp sounds. But I'm left wondering how many Sabbath fans noticed that he's using digital modeling these days, or if they can even tell when he started doing that. People don't like change. It takes a lot of marketing hype to create motion for change to happen. And most people won't even notice it happen. Just like with Sabbath albums.
  - TheRoque 2y ago
    Poorly used generative AI is obvious to spot though
- BlobberSnobber 2y ago
  The logitech app has a chatbot for some god-forsaken reason

samdung 2y ago

In just a few months every website that has had a customer support chat-plugin seems to have become 'AI Powered'. And all they seem to do is go on in a circular drivel.

sensanaty 2y ago
I work for a company providing those kind of solutions and yeah, the mandate from above is that we need to build an AI bot that will replace real human CS agents. The "vision" from our CEO is that he wants to replace 95% of all human interactions with the bot, to which the dev team in unison exclaimed "what the fuck?". It's literally just calling the OpenAI APIs with some overly complex system prompt. It is laughably useless, constantly lies, but some of our bigger (read: soul-less corpo) customers love it because they can get rid of a portion of their CS team even further than they've already been doing. From what I've noticed, it's mostly marketers, spammers/scammers, and the C-level and their investor buddies that are excited about AI, and the not-so-cynic in me can't see it for anything else other than a way for them to fire people en-masse to make more money by automating their jobs away, regardless of if the quality is horrendous or not. I think we're already reaching a point where regular people are kind of sick of all the AI shit, though. Who knows, maybe people start abandoning anything that smells of AI en-masse? It's nice to dream, anyway.

sensanaty 2y ago

Once you look past the initial reaction of "oh cool a computer can do this!?" You quickly start running into the limitations. And if you're in a product team building some AI feature (aka calling an OpenAI API 90% of the time), you realize even more how laughably useless it is in actuality. For example Notion. They have an AI feature, and it's hilariously useless. It can barely even summarize things, yet alone write the rest of the document for you. Yet they push it constantly onto you with no way of disabling the crap. What I have noticed is that the marketing people are in love with it, because it lets them generate the useless drivel they spam people with easier than before. I suspect they never used their brains much, but now they don't even have to at all! Coincidentally, scammers also love it for similar reasons...

fhd2 2y ago
Same here. I know a number of sales and marketing people that just _won't_ shut up about ChatGPT, trying to get me to use it more the way it's useful to them. I know for a fact that there's nothing in it for them promoting it to me, they're honestly just in love. They do use it to write drivel. They write promotional posts, mass emails and LinkedIn requests, briefs for their conferences and events... The typing speed of one of these guys was about two words per minute, ChatGPT probably really does save him hours. I noticed he mostly uses voice input. When I say stuff like I want to think about what points to make he'd get confused, he'd just ask ChatGPT what points he could make. He doesn't even think about that part anymore. I can certainly see how those kinds of people will push product teams to integrate assistant features and happily promote them. It really does seem to be life changing for them. Personally, I can't relate though.

EdwardDiego 2y ago

The fact that every C-suite in America simultaenously decided "We need AI in our product. Look, just jam it in somehow, you'll make it fit" is, I'm sure, unrelated. AI is a keyword for investors currently, that's all. Like all the companies that previously sprouted a blockchain unrelated to their core product.

kreyenborgi 2y ago
I've even seen AI being used as an argument for destroying more wilderness in order to build power plants – so we can "stay ahead of the AI revolution with green power", just like at some point blockchain was.
sensanaty 2y ago
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24 Someone else linked it above, but after seeing this, yeah no wonder people are getting tired of it. Basically every single company in the batch mentions AI.

mrtksn 2y ago

Just an anecdote but I had a small mobile app that would make people pay money for the premium features, and (surprising for me) many people happily paid. Although the app had very positive reviews, it wasn't growing fast enough to make it into a meaningful income. So I told myself, why don't I add AI stuff on it like an AI assistant as a primary way of interaction? Everyone loves AI, it's the future! Then the app retention tanked, as well as the install numbers and no purchase was made after that. People didn't even bother with leaving bad reviews. Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it. Like the artificial sweeteners maybe? "0 calories and the same taste with the sugar? Why would anybody ever use sugar again, right? Lets short the sugar cane and corn fields and put all our money into artificial sweeteners production equipment and chemicals"

frde_me 2y ago
> Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it. I think everyone is tired of conversing with a chatbot over text by now. But there are ways of integrating AI without making the primary interactions a pain. I'm also a bit puzzled by why people think it's a good idea in the first place Using a chatbox as a way to do primary interactions? Nope. But use that same AI to quickly summarize reviews for a product into a digestible format that I can easy glance at, or ignore? That last one actually saves me time, and doesn't harm my user experience, so why not?
- mrtksn 2y ago
  I agree, IMHO people don't like to interact with AI, but they love it when the tedious work is done by AI. The interaction part is cool at first until your curiosity about the tech itself vanishes. The current AI tech has some very useful use cases and its here to stay but its not replacing human interaction or the Human-Computer interface as I previously believed. The AI pin, Rabbit and who knows who else failed in attempting to replace human interactions or screen UI with speech or text. Chatbots look so deceivingly capable but they are completely useless when it comes holding authority and trust. Every real human will always provide you with accurate information best to their knowledge and when they fail on it(sometimes in bad faith) its considered a big deal and can lead to anything from being angry with to not trusting that person ever again(therefore ignoring that person when possible) and in some cases imprisonment of the person. AI lying is too cheap to warrant a human interaction. It's pure waste of time when it comes to doing anything consequential.

tauntz 2y ago

Anecdotal evidence but my reaction to seeing a Google product release mentioning anything related "Gemini AI" makes me subconsciously assume that they made the product worse by including a totally unrelated and barely working feature that nobody asked for. The only reason for most of these features is, I assume, that there's a requirement now for all PMs to ship something with "Gemini AI" in its title or they won't get a promotion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

gwervc 2y ago
The good thing is that going by Google track record, the feature will live only a few years.

charlieyu1 2y ago

Not surprising at all, there is a big trend of using AI for cutting costs while producing stuff with minimal quality. Once the initial hype is over, the consumers will hate how repetitive it is.

ksaj 2y ago
The cost is currently offloaded to the AI providers. OpenAI is apperently burning cash like crazy, in that their revenue is far lower than their expenses. For now, during its formative years anyway. Once the initial hype is over, we will just take it for granted that the software we're using is doing something with AI. The costs will have to either be solved, or flipped to the consumer, though. Right now, it's a free-for-all, and worth taking advantage of, if you can.

HPsquared 2y ago

I think it's the association with "AI-generated slop content". People associate the use of AI in an existing area as being a poor-quality facsimile of the real thing, whatever the "real thing" is. That, or an unnecessary addition causing annoyance (aka Clippy) On the other hand, for genuinely new use-cases where AI is central and beneficial, I'd be surprised if there was a negative reaction. It is "new shiny thing" vs "cheap plastic imitation". Reminds me of The Graduate "One word. Plastics."

amrocha 2y ago
There are no genuinely new use cases for AI
- HPsquared 2y ago
  High speed of generating content is new.
  - pona-a 2y ago
    SEO have farms existed previously, and as far as I can tell, their unwilling consumers weren't really asking for more at higher bandwidth but with even less accuracy.
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      For one predefined type of content maybe, but not on the kind of quality and versatility that appeared in the last year or two. You couldn't just randomly say "hey Google, code me up a PowerShell script that does x, y and z" and have a back-and-forth discussion. This is completely new.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    But the content is _bad_. Nobody, or virtually nobody, wants an increased supply of bad content. There's already far more than enough of that.

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago

It's this simple: generative AI is poisoning culture. Everyone knows this -- even the people pushing it. We know what it is doing to art, what it is doing to just being able to find a book on amazon, what it is doing to reviews, to website searches, to authenticity everywhere. Splitting hairs about whether people think it's the terminology or the functionality is absurd. Stop making generative AI products that are the cultural equivalent of breaking into the community pool solely to piss in it. People don't really want this. They have an instinct that a lot of AI products are little more than grift (trained by their experiences with "Web 3.0"). And this study is showing that.

krapp 2y ago
The only thing that is going to stop generative AI is companies using it not making as much money as they expected. It's probably going to take a crash and another AI winter. Maybe I'm too blackpilled on AI already but I absolutely believe companies will just keep throwing money at it until it's literally existentially impossible to do so, just because the promise of the capitalist version of free energy (delusional as it may be) is just too great to resist. The degree to which our culture is already largely controlled and manufactured by corporations and sold to us without our input or consent is a separate conversation we should have, collectively, because AI is just pissing harder into an already pissed in pool in that regard.
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  > because AI is just pissing harder into an already pissed in pool in that regard. It is, and I agree. But I suspect you agree with me that this is not how people feel. If you see someone lying on the street, bloodied, and you don't help, expect to be judged by that person about as harshly as they judge the person who beat them up. Corporate culture has never come for art and writing as dismissively and callously as generative AI does. This isn't pop stars and TV. This is coming to the artist who has self-taught oil paintings, the photographer who has built their own artistic camera, the pencil sketch artist who has learned photorealistic sketching and saying "hey, I know your work is almost impossible to share with people already and sharing it is the thing that makes you feel good... but I'm going to make that worse by drowning it in autogenerated shit. Oh and hey, you know how you developed a style and sold a couple of things? I've trained my system so that your customers can just generate work in your style without even giving you money, so that should make you happy, right? Happy customers are good." This is not a mere extension of corporate culture. This is a callous, systematically careless, dismissive kick in the face to people on the ground. And we all feel it, either on our own behalf as creative people, or for those artists we admire.

ogou 2y ago

I travel often in Europe and see these AI assistants on many websites and apps now. Two things generally happen when I have tried to use them. First, nothing actionable is possible. They can't actually do anything. No trip changes, refunds, connections, or baggage tracing. It takes a significant amount of time to get to to the response, "Sorry I can't help with that, please call xxx during business hours or visit our website at xxx." Second, they invariably end up as marketing funnels with upsells offered in place of solutions. I see that as the main source of anger from others in airports. They try to deal with something and end up in marketing loops. When I see AI assistance as a travel feature I assume it is not only going to be useless, but actively disruptive to my experience.

Nursie 2y ago
“Yet another layer I have to fight through before I can speak to someone who may actually be able to do something useful” Yup.

Lerc 2y ago

This does not surprise me, this is a new technology that people are wary of. People are far more aware of marketing techniques these days an know that when a device is advertised as having trendy feature X, it probably doesn't have anything to do with the meaningful aspects of the feature. Consider how many atomic themed products there were in the 60's. We can be thankful that the only way most of these were actually atomic is in that they were made of atoms. The naivety if those days has gone. Information (true or not) travels so quickly now , everyone is a bit jaded. Many are outright nihilistic. It's worth noting that people's opinion of AI in product is distinct to the actual AI itself. I'm not in a position to find the reference right now, but I remember reading about a study which showed people felt that when given artworks to judge, the ones they were told were by AI were inferior. This was independent from whether or not each piece was actually by an AI or a human.

perlgeek 2y ago

I'd love to see more products use some machine learning in ways that fit their current UI paradigms. For example: * You enter an ambiguous search term into a search engine. It shows you some results, but it also shows you some buttons to filter by meaning. For example if you've entered "universal", it could give you an option to filter out all pages where "universal" appears as the name of the film studio, without a hack like excluding "universal films", but actually deciding based on context * If you've touched up a few photos the same way, an image processing program could give you a suggestion for a touch-up for the next photo, along with options to tweak it * In an email program, if you've moved a few emails to a folder, it could suggest a selection of other emails to move to the same folder, or maybe suggest to you a mail rule that would do it for you in future. ... and please, provide an option to switch it off.

fch42 2y ago

There is value way beyond the immediate service given in a human to human interaction; we're social animals after all and tend to derive a form of pleasure out of "being with others". In the same sense that granny went praying the rosaries Saturday evening before mass, because that also got her the coffee and cake with her friends ahead of that, and the chats afterwards. Just like the person at the till chatting with the cashier, the person talking to the surgery's receptionist (and not just about booking in the doc), or the talk with the pharmacist about how and when best to take the prescription medicine (and since we meet monthly for that anyway ... give me the gossip and the events in town as well) - this used to happen because, quite frankly, "efficient" communication and "efficient" human to human interaction is not what we seek. It'd be rude. And that's where the whole chatbot, AI or no, thing falls a little. No matter how smarmy or even actually helpful that chat thing is, it doesn't shake my hand, won't do me favours, probably not take me to the shops after work, and ask me whether I need help or why I look sad. Nor complement me on my eyes. I don't know; at least in me, the herd animal roars loudly enough that I feel unvalued whenever I am forced to interact non-physically. The distance can be felt. And to me, that is not a "protective distance" but an "excluding" one. Makes me more lonely.

latentnumber 2y ago
Exactly. Beautifully written. Relatedly, a friend is working on an AI interviewer and when I tried her prototype, it felt extremely dehumanizing. "But it's efficient."

everdrive 2y ago

AI is being pushed everywhere, and I couldn't hate it more. I don't want an AI assistant. I don't want to "talk" to a computer. I don't want a company diving mindlessly into the next trend just because they're afraid of being left behind. As others have said, it's a sign that a company doesn't really know what it's doing. I hear executives brag that they put all their emails through an AI assistant. This just tells me two things: they're apparently bad at articulating themselves, and no one is actually reading their emails.

plasticeagle 2y ago
"If you couldn't be bothered to write it - why should I be bothered to read it?" - Some Internet Wag. That's the thing, isn't it. AI output is so low-effort that it may as well not exist at all. Just send me the prompt instead, if you're going to do that.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/k1dIVRr.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/k1dIVRr.jpeg When an entire culture is built on constant pointless pretense, is it really surprising that there is considerable effort put into optimizing it?

KronisLV 2y ago

I really like something like GitHub Copilot and Copilot Chat, because they help with boilerplate and simple functions, as well as lower the barrier for doing some exploratory work and iterating. Something like Phind is even better in those cases where you care about looking into the actual sources that are returned, as opposed to just testing the output for your needs. I also like general purpose chat/writing/instruct models and they're a nice curiosity, even the image generation ones are nice for either some placeholder assets, texture work, or some sometimes goofy art. HuggingFace has some nice models and the stuff that people come up with on Civitai is sometimes cool! Video generation is really jank for now, I wonder where we'll be in 20 years. Overall, I'm positive about "AI", but maybe that's because I seek it out and use it as a tool, as opposed to some platform shoving it down my throat in the form of a customer service bot that just throws noise at me while having no actual power to do anything. There are use cases that are pleasant, also stuff like summarizing, text prediction, writing improvements, but there are also those that nobody asked for.

blibble 2y ago

AI becoming associated in consumers minds with cheap useless garbage is the best thing that could have happened AI is the shovelware wii game of the 2020s I wonder what this will do to the YC S24 batch... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24

sensanaty 2y ago
Wow, basically every single company there incorporates AI into their pitch or even name somehow... I mean I respect the grift I guess, but I'm not surprised in the least that people are quickly growing tired of it all. Some of the ideas I'm seeing on that list are just straight up idiotic, but since it leverages AI somehow it's suddenly a good idea, I guess...
mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
AI is the shovelware wii game of the 2020s Man, I wish shovelware games had been a temporary problem we grew out of. The Switch store is still riddled with them, and the PSN store has some obvious grift as well. All of the "Jumping <Food>" SKUs that are just achievement fodder, for example.

doodaddy 2y ago

As a term, “AI” has become synonymous with “new”. And “new” has become synonymous with “good”. We are in an age where age is a liability. If it’s not new it’s old, and old isn’t good. And it’s all sad because it’s simply not true. But marketing teams wide and far are pushing this narrative. And I think companies are encouraging their marketing teams to do it because it’s an easy way to dress up a half-baked product, hiding it behind a buzzword. But I don’t think it’s a signal to consumers as much as a signal to investors and competitors. Since when does the consumer care about which technology was used to build a product? Has a consumer ever said “wow this product is so good it must have been built with Rust!” The bottom line is it shouldn’t matter and it doesn’t. People need features, not technology, even though many of them confuse the two.

cchi_co 2y ago

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kebsup 2y ago

I'm building a flashcard language learning app, and the Meta ad with the phrase "AI-powered" performs better than all other variations, so depends.

Scarblac 2y ago
My first association with flash card apps is that it's extremely tedious to create the cards for what you're trying to memorize, so if AI can help with that, that may be worth it.

netcan 2y ago

I don't think it's disillusionment with the tech. Consumers barely touch the tech. It's disillusionment with the marketing I think this goes beyond just consumers. If you listen in on a random companies' strategic planning... Any project with "ai" in its title is likely to be bullschtick. "AI enabled" is our 2024 "now with electrolytes."

solarkraft 2y ago

It means unreliable. I saw an ad for a cool scheduling app. Once they mentioned it‘s „AI powered“ (why??) I started worrying about it randomly missing events.

poikroequ 2y ago

AI is not being marketed to consumers. AI is being marketed to investors.

dmd 2y ago

Logitech's *mouse driver* now has AI in it[0]. [0] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/software/logi-options-plus.html https://www.logitech.com/en-us/software/logi-options-plus.ht...

bfrog 2y ago

Yeah I’d rather not be part of the experiment thank you. If something takes intelligence to do I want to talk to a human that can help do it. AI isn’t going to magically help solve problems with technology. Frankly I’m tired of technology. I miss people.

peanut_worm 2y ago

AI just means “annoying chatbots and low quality content” to most people

tmpfs 2y ago

Think about trying to get customer service from any company now, we all end up talking to AI bots that don't actually help at all. No wonder the public perception is bad, our experience of AI is often based on these automated services which actually make our lives more frustrating.

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GuB-42 2y ago

Many consumers have a working bullshit detector. And they are starting to understand that "AI" is usually a meaningless buzzword. And people don't like being bullshitted. And even to those who think there is real meaning behind it, do you really think people want "intelligence" everywhere, artificial or not. People don't want their toaster to be intelligent, they just want it to toast. So what is an AI powered toaster? A toaster you have to argue with regarding how you want your bread toasted? And in many cases that's what happens when you replace a push button with an "AI assistant", so people are not wrong about it either.

indigo0086 2y ago

One thing I and probably many others notice about AI integration is it places incorrect operation on the user's plate. If the user gets a wrong answer, well just remember ai tends to do that. People are trying to find ways to make a truly intuitive ai interface that isn't just a text box you chat with. With adequate error recognition and correction integrating ai shouldn't be something the user notices other than the time it takes to process. This would be another issue as integrating ai just adds a time lag on those operations which can depress user sentiment in another way

snakeyjake 2y ago

As far as I can tell, AI is only useful for: 1. Making really, really, REALLY, shitty "art" 2. Writing nonsensical and boring short stories or bland written-by-committee memos that make you sound like a soulless AI 3. Creating summaries that are pathetic compared to the first paragraph of any wikipedia article on literally any topic (also, they are often 100% wrong) 4. Acting as a useless, actually worse that useless due to being both useless and time wasting, wall between you and a human who can actually do something "assistant" 5. Looking at images and telling me if there's a cat or a fruit in them 6. Being a worse chatbot than ELIZA was 50 years ago 7. Writing code that, if it is anything more complex than something you can copy and paste from Stack Overflow and have work, you have to spend more time fixing than if you had just written it yourself But it is very good at bombarding users with an infinite stream of garbage content that is cheap and effortless to create so it will eventually devour everything.

iainctduncan 2y ago

This is not at all suprisinging to me. In general, companies underestimate the intelligence of the consumer and are pretty bad at imagining being a consumer looking at their company. We are all being indundated with AI hype, and it's almost all telling companies "you can save money by getting AI to do a mediocre-to-ouright-shitty versions of this work instead of hiring people". As a consumer, why would I choose a company optimizing for their margins at the expense of my experience? Touting AI has become a warning sign that the company is doing this.

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n_ary 2y ago

For me personally, when I see "AI" suddenly popping up on something I am subscribed to, 8/10 times, there is some sort of chatbot suddenly added there; nothing ground breaking, nothing cool(that didn't exist before), just a random chatbot! Secondly, I am slightly burntout looking at all the "BlockChain", "distributed", "Crypto" for like last decade and now suddenly the same products(and products from same people) did a swap of "crypto" or "blockChain" with "AI". Needless to say, my mind is jaded from all those scammy blockchain peedlers that when I see an "AI" (e.g. TodoAI, like wtf? I just want to add some text and dates and want to check those when am done or just show me a notification if I forgot..), I just feel like someone is trying to scam me. Also, I noticed that some products suddenly hiked the price after adding the "AI" in their featureset, which wouldn't feel scammy(because inflation happened), but if I see some crappification of the product post AI, it just leaves a bad taste that next time I see anything with "AI" as feature, I assume it is also some crap. I know, don't judge a book by fathers and children must not be judged by deeds/sins of their fathers but what can I say. Also, most of the products are clearly proxying stuff to ChatGPT with a system prompt, you can actually sense it, if you have used OpenAI apis. Which causes me extra pain, because c'mon, you are selling me a proxy with a prompt and charging me like $5.99/month!

isleyaardvark 2y ago

It's quite simple. Consumers realize either consciously or not that saying "AI" means the added AI will make the product: 1. cheaper 2. worse It's invariably used as a cost-cutting measure that is quick, cheap, and worse. Companies use AI art because they are too cheap to hire a real artist that would make better art. Companies use AI chatbots because they are too cheap to hire real customer service agents who could actually help people. If a company slapped a label on a bag of chips that said "Now with fewer chips and less flavor!", I'm sure that would turn off consumers as well.