6 ms·

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. Altho

• 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.
  • InsideOutSanta 2y ago
    Most LLM-based chat user interfaces are just so terrible. They seem interesting on a surface level, because it feels like they should be able to help with whatever issue you have, and the demos make it look as if they do, but in reality, they almost never do anything. They just pretend to be a human who has the ability to actually do something. When Microsoft showed Windows Copilot, what they showed made it feel like you could do things like tell it to "create a new user account with the name John and the password 285uoa29tu and put the picture of a dandelion as the profile picture," but you can't. It can't really do anything, other than give you (often misleading) advice on how you can do things yourself. People have learned that. They have learned that these chat LLMs are just a facade used to waste their time, a simulacrum not of a human being, but of the outward appearance of a human being. It's another hurdle companies put in place for people to jump across before they can talk to an actual person who has the actual ability to do something for them. So when people see "AI", they don't see "helpful tool," they see "an obstacle I have to get rid of to actually get anything done." Who would want to pay for that?
  • benterix 2y ago
    Maybe because chatbots in general, not just AI chatbots, are a terrible idea in the first place? And even in the cases where idea might be somewhat OK (instead of wading through tons of support documents or FAQs just ask a question and get redirected to the answer) it usually is implemented terribly. Honestly, what's the point of even considering implementing it if the only interaction will be "I want to talk to a human"?
  • klyrs 2y ago
    > But use that same AI to quickly summarize reviews for a product into a digestible format that I can easy glance at, or ignore? You want to give them more plausible deniability in lying to you about reviews?
• noobermin 2y ago
  Sincerely, everyone in my real life I know bemoans AI hype. The only really love it has is in memes (things like voice swaping, singing politicians, things like that). I'm surprised people on HN have no exposure to such people.
  • emseetech 2y ago
    I bemoan AI but it's been disheartening as the hype spreads everywhere. It feels like everyone is building an AI startup. Maybe I'm naive, but it doesn't feel like we're done building the boring stuff yet.
    • mdm12 2y ago
      We're not done building the boring stuff or solving the hard problems either. One is, well, boring and the other is...hard. Easy enough to proxy out prompts to OpenAI for your next funding round, though.
  • edanm 2y ago
    How many people in your life "hate AI" but love that feature in Google Photos that lets you search your photos by a person's name? People don't generally like or dislike the combustion engine. They like the ability to get from place to place faster.
    • temac 2y ago
      Probably when writing "hate AI" here the meaning was hate the often useless text chat bot. Google Photo face recognition was there before the new hipe and is probably not designated talked by primarily as "AI" by the general public.
      • YeahThisIsMe 2y ago
        People also like privacy, and most of the time "AI" means "your stuff is going to our servers". I don't need or want that from most applications, especially a photo viewer.
• lotsofpulp 2y ago
  >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" No one ever thought this because low calorie sweeteners taste different than refined sugar. Even cane sugar tastes different than high fructose corn syrup. Also, they are all chemicals. Everything is. Stevia is even extracted from a plant, just like cane sugar or corn syrup.
  • mrtksn 2y ago
    It's hypothetical example for a product that is supposed to be a replacement to something we readily use but has an issue like being too expensive/rare/hard to make. I don't know much about sweeteners, for me its this thing that you can use instead of sugar if you are concerned about calories.
  • cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    It is incredibly obvious what is colloquially meant by “chemicals”. There’s no such thing as a fish. Blah blah blah. Don’t be tone-deaf in the name of scoring an extra point online.
    • lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Other than to baselessly denigrate, it is not obvious to me what is meant by “chemicals”.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • harimau777 2y ago
        A working description might be some combination of: - Synthesized or highly processed versions of or replacements for a normally natural or well established substance; often for the purpose of cost. E.g. high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, rayon, chrome tanned leather, etc. - Synthesized or highly processed substances that promise to provide the advantages of a natural or well established substance but without any of the drawbacks. E.g. sweeteners without calories, waterproofing sprays that promise breathability, anti-stick coatings that don't require the care of cast iron, replacing metal with light weight plastics, etc. For me it tends to come down to two rules of thumb that my life experience has given me: - Highly processed products (particularly food) tend to be unhealthy. - There is no free lunch. If some new material promises to eliminate the drawbacks of an existing material, then it probably has different drawbacks that you don't know about yet.
• pjc50 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41119245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41119245 - as I said last time, it's become a cheapness signal.
  • tim333 2y ago
    I'm a bit wary that something calling itself AI may be like Siri or some bad customer service bot.
• madaxe_again 2y ago
  The current wave of AI stuff is likely not indicative of how AI will be used in consumer-facing businesses in the future. At the moment, it’s there for all to see, be it as a chatbot or whatever - but the real applications will be under the hood, not directly interacting with the consumer, doing everything from market microsegmentation to tailored recommendations to diagnostics, credit scoring, criminal profiling, fraud detection, and all of the things that currently rely on sub-optimal human-crafted algorithms or even hand-cranking. So all in all, what consumers think of AI is almost neither here nor there, as they are not the primary market - business and government are.
  • conartist6 2y ago
    In other words, its job will be perpetual-bias-perpetuator! I cannot fucking wait.
    • ben_w 2y ago
      Could be. One of the annoying things is that when the AI has a bias people agree with, they say "algorithms can't be biased!", yet when the AI has one they do disagree with "it's so unfair they've made it woke/racist [delete as appropriate]". Reality is difficult, AI is difficult, statistics is difficult, everything is difficult. Accidental bias is almost inevitable no matter what, and that's one of the things GDPR is there for, to make sure errors can be fixed.
      • anonymousab 2y ago
        The EU AI act that went into force today also spells out some limitations. I think it would have been fun to require companies using AI to prove/show exactly why it makes a determination or decision, upon request, if it's being used to make decisions where we say that such biases should not be perpetuated. That this is burdensome or not yet possible with current LLM limitations is a problem to solve (or "tough shit") for the companies creating or using this technology; a necessary reckoning that they should have been forced to face from the onset.
  • 2y ago
• Nursie 2y ago
  My tech friends mostly find it interesting. On top of that some of them find it a little threatening, others (like me) are somewhat concerned about the ethics of hoovering up a significant proportion of human creativity and then charging money back to people for the output of models based on it. My non-tech friends, particularly the more creative ones hate AI and will actively avoid it. They see a way for rich tech bros to put real people out of jobs. They see ahead of them an internet drowning in AI shit (on an internet already drowning in non-AI shit), further enshittifying their day to day interactions. And they see yet another ludicrous hype cycle. My challenge to AI-using folks is the same as it was to blockchain people - make a product with compelling, amazing features. Don't mention AI, just sell it on how awesome it is and how amazing the capabilities are. Use AI/ML under the covers to achieve that awesomeness without trying to ride the hype wave. Then you'll have achieved something. The difference is, of course, that I imagine that AI will (and to some extent already does) deliver on that...
• beowulfey 2y ago
  In my experience, the people in my friend group are wary of AI because of the potential it has to eliminate jobs. I think the generally negative connotation comes from this "replacement of human effort" interpretation. If it can be done cheaper and easier with AI, that will naturally supplant effort a human could have made. Since non-techies are often the people being displaced in this scenario, it doesn't sit well with them when AI shows up in a product they like. (For what it's worth, I mostly agree with this sentiment.)
• navjack27 2y ago
  No this is actually exactly 100% it. It's not a strange situation it is just simple irrational exuberance for AI. Consumers do actually hate it. They don't want to be around it and they don't want it anywhere.
• ElFitz 2y ago
  There’s the issue that many products seem to consider AI to be a feature in itself, and market it as such. People don’t care about it. They just want to do whatever it was they wanted to do. It doesn’t matter wether the tool uses hardcoded empirical heuristics, a hand-crafted statistical model, AI, or leprechauns.
• rsynnott 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. This isn't that strange. There have been a number of things that people have tried to push upon consumers over the last few decades that just haven't landed. Notable examples: 3d TVs, metaverses.
• orev 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’m surprised to learn that so many product makers are hyped about AI. I just assumed that everyone is doing it because they’re being forced to by the marketing department. Of course there are some good uses of it, mostly on the pattern recognition side, but on the generative side, that type of use seems best confined to their own silos and not incorporated into every product.