14 ms·

Study shows that tacking the “AI” label on products may drive people away

343 points by breadwinner 2y ago

motbus3 2y ago
Marketing people is trying to shovel AI in everything in the sense of AI as in video games not as in AI as in General AI. It's the same as the Smart products era.
joegibbs 2y ago
I think avoid any kinds of buzzwords like AI, high tech, whatever and just focus on what it actually does, which is a lot more impressive. You can try to wow the customer with a bunch of words but it’s all fluff - and everyone is implementing AI now, and usually these “implementations” are ChatGPT with RAG on the docs or something else that everyone’s done before. What you end up getting is only slightly better than typing in chatgpt.com. If you’ve managed to get something that solves a problem just explain what it does to solve that.
- nomoreusernames 2y ago
  [dead]
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Yeah, it's the same way that ".com" or "online" used to be buzzwords too, that nowadays just feel kind of cheap. If most things have AI, then simply saying you have AI doesn't really mean much. Sell the solution, not the technology, etc.
  - cokeandpepsi 2y ago
    [dead]
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    Reminds me of ancient motels (with signage that probably hasn't been updated in decades) that proudly announce that their rooms are air conditioned and have color tv. Not that those aren't nice to have, but they are pretty much expected today.
    - ablation 2y ago
      The Kano Model in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model
- fsckboy 2y ago
  you don't realize it, but you are suggesting bog standard marketing advice: "Customers don't buy features, they buy benefits. You need to point out how your product benefits the customer." Around here that would correspond to "addressing pain points" "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole." - Ted Levitt HBS
  - resonious 2y ago
    I guess even big corps like Microsoft need this reminder. GitHub's front page says "The world’s leading AI-powered developer platform."
    - smugglerFlynn 2y ago
      They probably ran A/B test and this wording led to increased registrations rate. Not sure why everyone instantly assumes product teams are not aware of marketings basics. It is consumers driving how the products evolve, not the other way around.
      - pnt12 2y ago
        I think that's a very forgiving perspective. Product teams are often wrong, and A/B tests can lead to inferior long term solutions. As always, it's best to criticize the idea, not the people.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    > "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole." Nah, speaking for plenty of guys, I'd say we want the drill. Maybe with an impact hammer too, of we can afford it. :)
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > which is a lot more impressive. Ah, well, there you run into a problem. Generally consumer ‘AI’ is pointless, and is there only because the markets are (or at least were; there are some indications that this may be ending) fixated on AI.
  - mcv 2y ago
    There may well be valid applications of consumer AI, but I don't think we've seen any good ones yet. Most consumer products currently clearly use AI as a marketing buzzword. Most blatant example I've seen is Logitech's AI mouse.
pyeri 2y ago
At least when it comes to apps and software, the term "AI powered" automatically gives me the impression of "bloated crapware" these days! But I'm sure sales folks must be making good use of that term to get more projects and revenues from non-technical or less aware managers.
- aikinai 2y ago
  Crapware maybe, but I don’t see a correlation between AI and bloat. If anything, AI features are correlated with less bloated software since the AI is supposed to smooth over complexity. And some companies are using it to deliver real value. Adobe has been killing it with AI features. I switched back to Lightroom and Photoshop specifically for the new automasking, generative AI fill and such.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    I wouldn't deny that some companies are using it to deliver real value, but I feel like the typical case I see is barely above the level of the Logitech AI mouse. (For anyone who's not familiar, the mouse itself doesn't use AI in any way - it just has a built-in keybind to a ChatGPT integration, and of course is sold at a $10 premium to the same model with no AI button.)
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Few in the consumer mass market have ever even opened photoshop before. The average person’s experience with “AI” is Siri telling them “I found this on the web” as a response to half of their questions. Or some streaming service suggesting a show they don’t want to watch. Or the Will Smith spaghetti meme. People who understand LLMs are on average fairly excited about what is happening recently. But those who don’t know what LLM stands for are skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.
    - l33t7332273 2y ago
      Many people who do know what LLM stands for (and could implement the architecture themselves) are also skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.
Tagbert 2y ago
It seems likely that if you can present a problem that customers have and a solution involving AI you’ll get a better response. It needs to be a real problem and the solution needs to be a better solution, though.
candiddevmike 2y ago
Wish it would start turning off investors so we can see other kinds of innovation.
imglorp 2y ago
Only some of the market is end users. The rest is businesses looking to replace headcount and they don't care what users think.
- samtho 2y ago
  They are starting to care about it after catching on to out how overstated the real world capabilities of AI are to actually replace headcount.
poikroequ 2y ago
AI isn't being marketed to consumers. AI is being marketed to investors. Regardless of whether or not it boosts sales, so long as it keeps driving up the stock price, they'll keep tossing around the word AI.
- geuis 2y ago
  Exactly. Marketing dollars come from investors. A big part of modern marketing for startups is spending tons of investor money to "grow" quickly. How long the fire burns doesn't matter, it's all about throwing dried out February Christmas trees onto the flames for quick bursts of flame.
- jrflowers 2y ago
  > AI isn't being marketed to consumers. This makes sense if you ignore every single example of AI-based features popping up all over consumer-facing services
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    Believe me, I'm trying.
  - maxbond 2y ago
    It's literally true that it is being marketed to consumers. GP was being somewhat poetic. Marketing to consumers is an instrumental goal in service of marketing to investors. The aim is to sell more stock to investors rather than more product to consumers. That being said, GP has made the implicit assumption that they can't market it to investors as AI and to consumers as something else, and if investor interest in AI doesn't ebb, then I expect they will find a way to do just that.
    - eastbound 2y ago
      AI is impossible to pitch to customers because its performance is not measurable. Could be good one day (remember Siri in 2017?) and crap the next. How would you pitch a feature with erratic behavior?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
happosai 2y ago
There is very few things in world that feel as repulsive as the glowing "AI" button in our Jira.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  My instance doesn't have this, and I'm kinda glad that it has not been enabled.
TeeWEE 2y ago
90% of AI companies are just thin layers on top of an LLM, sometimes useful but they have all the problems LLM have (I will explain) For existing companies with AI features: more useful but mostly LLM bolted on with the same use cases. They can improve the product if used right. But for me it’s mostly often just a gimmick. The problem with LLMs: They mostly generate stuff they have seen and are bad as truly new stuff. They make mistakes You need to put time and energy in the review it. For stuff that transforms data it’s useful. Like rewriting a piece of text. It’s also useful for search queries on the corpus the LLM is trained on. It’s good at pattern recognition and lastly: human like voice interfaces. But for generating novel stuff: good luck reviewing it. People who just blindly copy paste the output of an LLM: that’s quite dangerous and potentially plain wrong. At least that’s my experience.
- bane 2y ago
  The fun bit is that the other 10% are just bog standard ML/DL models with the added benefit of being called "AI".
seydor 2y ago
Nice try, competitors
ks2048 2y ago
I thought for a few years at Apple keynote presentations, they were saying "machine learning" while Google was saying "AI" hundreds of times. I assumed because they thought "AI" had a privacy-invasion or anti-human connotation to it. But, then this year they came out with "Apple Intelligence", which people will just see as "AI". So, I guess they finally gave up on that.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  ‘AI’ became a bit of a term non grata after the last big AI bubble popped in the late 90s, and people just called everything machine learning or similar. Google was merely more willing than Apple to try reviving it; up until recently very few companies dared use the term.
- rahkiin 2y ago
  I like they still do not really use AI but capitalized on the hype still. But they presented actionable features with intelligence behind it unlike many companies. With Apple Intelligence it can be whatever they want it to be. Could be ChatGPT, could be rule based. AI is now being linked to ChatGPT/conversational for many people
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  Weird how calling it Apple Intelligence is the same thinking as Jack Ma calling it "Alibaba Intelligence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulqRsqD0R64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulqRsqD0R64
stingraycharles 2y ago
Depends on who your customers are. In B2B anything that mentions “AI” still sells like hot cakes, especially enterprises where the person who buys (ie signs the contract) isn’t the person who uses the product. We’re currently doing a bunch of “AI at the Edge” projects, even though it’s hardly justified (“edge” in this case is just an on-prem datacenter), but you need to use buzzwords like these to convince executives.
- BizarreByte 2y ago
  > but you need to use buzzwords like these to convince executives. And yet we’re told execs are smarter than the rest of us and deserve to make so much more than we do. Someday I pray the executive class gets its comeuppance.
joduplessis 2y ago
Kinda hilarious seeing how hard people went to add "AI" to pretty much everything.
blotterfyi 2y ago
I was recently at a non-AI security conference and was passing through a hallway. Heard the term AI like 10 times in 10 minutes. Everytime that happens, I go back to that meme that got created after Google's IO when Sundar Pichai said "ai, ai, ai..." like 113 times.
senectus1 2y ago
every Wed I have a meeting with MS. I've started tallying every time co-pilot/AI/Chat-GPT is mentions. week before last its was 100 times in 34 mins, last week it was about 15 times. (not) looking forward to what this week will be.
azinman2 2y ago
> said Dogan Gursoy, one of the study’s authors and the Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of hospitality business management at Washington State University The irony… I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  In the future, every university chair is sponsored by Taco Bell.
  - another-dave 2y ago
    And you get graded on a Bell curve
    - arcanemachiner 2y ago
      The Doritos® Locos Taco curve.
  - chgs 2y ago
    And every politician sponsored by Carls Junior
  - Findecanor 2y ago
    Except when they visit Europe for a conference, in which case it is Pizza Hut, because Taco Bell is not as well-established there.
    - jajko 2y ago
      Who eats there in Europe? Its mcdonalds of pizzas, the worst quality on the market, in this case a product that has little in common even in appearance with traditional pizza, more like hearthy focaccia. Less good, less healthy. Maybe good for late night drunks and stoners with nothing else still opened, but I know literally nobody who ever even mentioned eating there.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685
mrmetanoia 2y ago
The advertisements for co-pilot during the Olympics were laughably bad. An attempt at the sentimental and way overplayed trope of people using search/apps interwoven with touching life moments. In this one though, it was all a bunch of sports related achievements they had to really stretch to tie back to co-pilot. Someone using it to make a chart tracking heart rate - like I'd put any health data in that thing. Then you have Google writing letters for your children or showing how their camera AI integrations can help you live a lie. Frankly I'm glad to see data showing consumers are turned off. Oh! And then for the executives they have Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba talking about data security and productivity.
- badgersnake 2y ago
  I keep getting Intel ones with Molly Caudery, the pole vaulter who didn’t get over the bar once, explaining how AI helps her analyse her performance. It’s clearly working well for her.
openrisk 2y ago
Oh well, it was good while it lasted. But now we need a brand new hype to replace the malfunctioning AI neon sign. Maybe "neural meta computing", or "quantum hyper reasoners"? You see, a calm, factual, truthful and informed conversation of different technologies actual maturity, merrits and risks is in nobody's interest. /s
- LeonB 2y ago
  Here’s a technological concept that deserves all the hype in the world and will never get it: - reliability
  - aglione 2y ago
    I'll help you: - relAIbility
n_ary 2y ago
For wiw, everything I used before on my Android now has an AI in it’s name(or screenshot) on PlayStore. So: * The AI Browser * AI note taking app * AI photo gallery * AI habit tracker * AI budget planner * AI music player * AI bank * AI hike planner * AI icon pack(wtf?!) * AI launcher * AI camera * AI news * AI PDF reader * AI comics viewer * AI Maps * AI food delivery * AI shopping experience * AI calorie tracker * AI video editor * AI backup * AI share * AI Authenticator(??) * AI partner * AI RoboAdviser(?) * AI Wallpapers * AI package tracker(?!) * AI health tracker And plenty other things I am forgetting. Even things that already had AI before are now new AI. This is getting out of hand.
- goatlover 2y ago
  This is basically Ant-Man and the Wasp, "Do you guys just put the word quantum in front of everything?".
firefoxd 2y ago
No one is dropping the term AI. There's only one culprit in all this: McKinsey. They are never the first to write the research, but when they do everyone follows. > McKinsey research estimates that gen AI could add to the economy between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually while increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent. When McKinsey releases a report, all product managers will present it in the next marketing slide and the ad budget will follow. If it fails to materialize, it's never their fault of course. The leader in market research is to blame. Google has no business advertising Gemini on TV. Like who is the target really? But an enterprise not embracing AI after the biggest Market Research firm says it's the future? I'm putting my money on Long Island Ice Tea AI next. [0]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/beyond-the-hype-capturing-the-potential-of-ai-and-gen-ai-in-tmt https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
- Animats 2y ago
  > McKinsey research estimates that gen AI could add to the economy between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually while increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent. That's about the same number McKinsey used for "the metaverse" a few years back.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    But it wasn't an AI Metaverse!
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > No one is dropping the term AI. Oh, they absolutely will. Like, they did _last_ time; in the early noughties the term ‘AI’ was poison and everything AI-adjacent got called ML. I suspect we’re already there again with consumers, though ‘AI’ may still work for investors for another year or so.
- akgJAn 2y ago
  Everyone associated with McKinsey fails upwards and enjoys a great career: https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biography-career-inconvenient-truth/ https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biograp... I have never heard of a sound advice originating from McKinsey that improved a company. It is hot air and promoted by the powerful who are in the right circles.
olliej 2y ago
They should avoid actually deploying the massively invasive and power hungry anti-feature as well
braza 2y ago
> A study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management in June found that describing a product as using AI lowers a customer’s intention to buy it. For the ones interested in the actual study instead the headline, this is the link for the original paper: Paper page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2... PDF: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040?needAccess=true https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...
nbzso 2y ago
It is nothing new. It is a nature of the economic models. We live in the bubble. The connection with reality is eroding progressively. You look at the information cycle you see opportunity, growth, futurism, promises, and social networks silos amplify what they find profitable. In reality: Economic instability, layoffs, wars, eroding of democracy everywhere, progressive government control, poverty, bad infrastructure, etc. Soon the reality will catch with tech bros and investors. Things are inflated to the brink. In this situation, AI marketing looks like a bad joke. ML is useful and applicable in a lot of use cases. But consumer AI fails time and time again to deliver the promised productivity boost and is expensive. So...
vero2 2y ago
Airports are a bellweather. This drives trends/investors/CEOs/middle managers. Living close to a large airport on a business city it was always - VMware - Azure - IBM etc Now-a-days - Get your employees co-pilot assisted Intel/Windows/etc to boost productivity
theGeatZhopa 2y ago
It's also turning me away. Not because I don't like or fear AI. It's because I know, the usages of AI in names of products is a sure sign for incompetent marketing, who doesn't know what to do and who is desperate. I wouldn't buy from marketing that is desperate to sell things after they dictated them.
- vladvasiliu 2y ago
  I never really bought the whole AI marketing spiels either, but I kinda understood the angle. They don't really know what they're selling, etc. But what really shocked me, was when people on the client side are asking suppliers if they're not working on anything AI-based, since everyone is doing it. But those people did always give me the vibe you're talking about: "they don't know what to do and are desperate". I guess my point is that maybe, at least some of the time, marketers aren't that stupid.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Trying to convince your customers they’re stupid for wanting what they want is generally a pretty dumb marketing/sales tactic.
  - theGeatZhopa 2y ago
    I didn't want to express that marketeers are stupid or so. In the opposite, it's an art to sell features. But having a product, like the mentioned washing machine in some thread here, and putting AI into the name is a sign of desperation for me. "We need a feature every other also might have.. let's put AI in the name and sell it twice the price" Anyway, when you start asking what AI is doing there, you'll realize it's just a simple sensor reading and thresholding (which AI is all about) I can't imagine a product with true AI - what is true AI? :)
- resonious 2y ago
  Yup. I've been seeing older products that I've used for awhile suddenly claim that they are "AI-powered" when I've never once used an AI feature of theirs (and often didn't even know they had one). Does not instill confidence.
atoav 2y ago
The thing is, I want a great product. Sometimes what I am looking for is a thing that involves LLMS, but most of the time what I hear is: telephones home and there is no way to stop it — and it probably doesn't even work half decent. Or the inclusion of the term AI is so ridiculous that you know nobody with reason works at that company.
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
What?! You mean that my company's half-baked quickly-on-the-bandwagon AI for AI's sake strategy might backfire? Shocking! Seriously though, it seems AI is being marketed towards investors, and that wherever it was included in a product it will be just to say it's on the product roadmap. If you're long enough in the game like myself you get to recognize these hype bubbles (CORBA anyone?) that claim to be about to take over the world and then fizzle out.
ImaCake 2y ago
A conference I helped organise had a lot of “AI” and “LLM” submissions. We had a blanket rule of ignoring all of them since they mostly sucked anyway. Meanwhile another conference I am going to has several “machine learning” talks which could have been titled something more informative like “image analysis” or “regression modelling”.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
In the same way, you should stop mentioning mobile, apps, the web, and other past over hyped stuff. That doesn't mean you should stop investing in doing those things well. It just means that you need to focus on the value you deliver to your customers through doing these things well. Everybody has an app. Having an app is not a distinguishing factor any more. In the eighties and nineties, companies slapped the word digital on just about anything. Especially on things that were very much analog. That doesn't mean computers flopped; they are very useful. It's a meaningless distinction to add the digital to a brand. AI is the same thing. It's a means to an end. You need to be talking about what you deliver with it. Not about how you deliver it. In the case of CNN that hosts this article, a lot of their content probably is at this point passing through some LLMs at this point. They don't have to advertise that of course. If they do their job right, you barely notice this. Arguably, they should be doing a lot more with AI than they are doing already. The news business is fiercely competitive. Margins are small, and they have to produce more content with fewer people. LLMs can help them do that.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > Having an app is not a distinguishing factor any more. Having an app is "fuck you, i don't want to install another app" these days...
  - madaxe_again 2y ago
    It has been for decades. Also, people don’t know what the hell they want or are talking about - so often people tell me they have no apps on their phone, they don’t like apps, they’re bad and wrong - and then I see they’ve got Facebook, instagram, 10 candy crush clones, etc. “what about those?” “Those aren’t apps. Those are things.” My mother has total disdain for “social media users” yet spends six hours a day on Facebook. She doesn’t see it as social media. “It’s more of a virtual parlour” So yeah. People don’t know what the hell they want or are talking about.
    - will5421 2y ago
      They know what they want, just not what they’re talking about.
nottorp 2y ago
But isn't this a good thing? For the customers. It makes it easier for us to avoid hype based products and look for something that's actually useful to us... By all means, please use "AI" everywhere.
bankcust08385 2y ago
Let's play buzzword bingo, shall we?: Organic AI blockchain VR triple-play agile sticky growth-hacking methodology with an addressable market. Ubiquitous design and UX is better than throwing around nebulous technical cant 99.999% of people don't understand and are partially terrified of taking their jobs. While automating the navigation of ambiguous requests and delivering more open results with less exhaustive and tedious coding is cool, these features delivered to users have to provide useful advantages to be essential or they're just going to come off as "me too" bandwagon jumping. "Self-hosted", "open architecture", "cloud optional" are terms I like to see but only because I'm weirdo who tinkers with things sometimes but don't necessarily want to spend all of my time fixing or supporting fragile hacks.
- deely3 2y ago
  Please add gamification to the list, and big data.
austin-cheney 2y ago
As a customer, and a developer, every time I see AI as a feature in product marketing I immediately think bullshit hype train. All other merchandising is ignored. If that’s all you have in your sales pitch then you are failing.
hoseja 2y ago
, journo terrified of AI says.
- broodbucket 2y ago
  I often thought most journalists were terrible and could be easily automated away, and having seen the rise of LLM-produced content, I am happy to say I was wrong and that we need more journalists
throw310822 2y ago
> A study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management Haha. So they made a splash talking about AI. Well played.
goralph 2y ago
> Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management This seems more relevant to physical consumer goods I share the sentiment but I don’t think this is tech related.
photonthug 2y ago
Brands increasingly seem to feel nothing but contempt for their customers, so I’m not sure they care. In so many areas customers have no real ability to choose anyway, so what else would commerce look like? There’s no reason to think brands want AI because their customers want it.
idiocrat 2y ago
Because of the fAItigue the mentioning of AI will go away, but the orweillian precrAIme is here to stay.
- idiocrat 2y ago
  PrecrAIme ©
camillomiller 2y ago
As a journalist, I would really wish to see a study saying that headlines like the one CNN used on this article drive readers away. I hate the “this generic thing you have to discover by reading past the first paragraph” trend so much.
bxguff 2y ago
because they tacked it on! If the product is carefully considered tech built from the ground up using AI or ML Those products would not drive people away. Now things that worked like search on google and social media sites is so bloated and inconsistent that your grandma would notice while touting AI powered search.
sklargh 2y ago
For founders chasing enterprise deals, a small piece of advice. In the Fortune 500s LLM chat UIs provided a canvas to which lawyers, privacy and procurement people painted all of their nightmares. So slapping AI on your product might help a little with investors but it might also slow down your first enterprise deal by a year.
0xTJ 2y ago
I hope it does. It should be a mark against a clothes dryer that it claims to use AI (unless it actually does, wherein I don't see a possible benefit, and wouldn't buy that anyways). Avoid buying products that pointlessly market themselves as "AI"; vote with your wallet to punish companies for bad behaviour. If they're doing it for the investors, make tacking on garbage buzzwords like "AI" hurt their bottom line.
- elif 2y ago
  What's the problem with AI washing machines? It analyses the laundry type and size to inform itself on how much detergent to use, analyses the laundry during the wash to know when it is clean enough, monitors the moisture level in the clothes to know when the drying is finished.. it's as if a person is there micromanaging the washing machine.. how is that not an artificial agent?
  - mdorazio 2y ago
    Exactly zero of that is AI. You've described an extremely basic control loop with a few simple sensors, a lookup table, and some if-then statements.
    - elif 2y ago
      That might be how you would implement it, are you refusing to concede that Samsung could have implemented it better than your strawman implementation? What is your standard for intelligence? My washing machine is already better at doing laundry than I am (even if I was in total control of a machine with identical capabilities), why is that not good enough for you?
      - oe 2y ago
        I think the point was that every new washing machine already does these things (measures how much detergent to use, checks when the water is clean enough etc.) without any AI. It’s not a very difficult problem domain.
Jamustico 2y ago
Same happen to crypto. I'm an huge crypto enthusiast, but whenever I see the term "crypto" being used somewhere I just cringe.
lumb63 2y ago
I know the “AI label” drives me away. It means the product is unreliable and a black box. The “AI” label also indicates the solution is way over complicated and simpler ways to improve the product have been ignored. For instance, Confluence now has an “AI” chatbot. Search is still substantially worse than grep.
- javier123454321 2y ago
  Yeah, for example, nerdwallet did an AI search/ask chat GPT about finances feature. I believe that not a single customer asked for their budgeting software to have an AI chatbot.
  - tail_exchange 2y ago
    But how else would they stamp an AI label to their product? Bolt a chatbot onto it, say you are AI-powered, and profit!
    - jerf 2y ago
      It's even worse than that. It's "bolt a chatbot on to your product, force it into people's workflow against their will, claim huge usage numbers on your quarterly result calls, stock price goes up". Not profits, just stock price. The evidence that anybody who isn't "selling shovels" has made any significant money yet with AI remains thin. I can't remember if it was Google or Facebook, but in the last earnings season one of them claimed directly that AI has improved their advertising revenue, but the improvement was not terribly out of line from what these companies have been doing for a while (not like suddenly they popped out a revenue triple, it was not obviously out of line with their normal reporting), and I wouldn't be surprised they were doing exactly what I said in my first paragraph. I did not find their claim terribly compelling, even if it was completely true and not just a sop to the stock market. Nobody else is even claiming that AI has increased profits. I'm sure there's some startups with some profits, maybe even very exciting amounts of profit for a startup, but nothing that would move the needle for established companies. In fact we seem to already be in the consolidation phase for the industry, the startups are starting to go under. If we use that as a timer for where we are in the hype cycle, this is underperforming compared to other bubbles; at this point in the dot com crash, while the sector was heavily overinvested it was also quite obvious to a calm observer not panicking about their portfolio that there was definitely a there there, it just wasn't ready to sustain that much investment. There is so far a lot less there there with AI. This hype is going to prove disastrous for the entire technology, I fear. If it was treated as a more normal technology, it would improve, it would be experimented with, companies would learn how to use it, failures would be shaken out and successes doubled down on, and in 3-10 years it would be a healthy industry making reliable, good money with a bright future for growth. But the way the stock market went absolutely ape shit, now the bar is, in roughly 6-12 months if AI has not quintupled the profit margin of all of the already-largest companies on Earth, it is a failure, and so are those companies. We've got a lot of people now with all the incentives in the world to blatently lie about their progress because as soon as they are truthful they become personally bankrupt as their stock options tank. Not because of any particular aspect of AI, except that it wasn't a miracle "drop it into any process instantly see quintupled profits", and I'm not inclined to be too annoyed at any technology for failing to be that. And it could take AI down with it. Again. I'd expect the resulting "AI winter" to be relatively short this time because the technology really is becoming promising, but the medium-term prospects for the tech are probably a lot dimmer than they theoretically should be because of this disproportionate frenzy.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
AI drives me away because I don't want to support the automation of creative tasks. Even if the application isn't replacing creative people, I don't want to support any of it. To hell with AI!
crowcroft 2y ago
It's not about whether AI signals if the quality is bad or good. It's that for most people they see 'AI' and they have no idea what that actually means. Sell benefits not features.
- classified 2y ago
  > they see 'AI' and they have no idea what that actually means. To be fair, the providers don't know either. At the moment enough users are crazy enough to buy that as a feature. Let's see how long this will last.
  - crowcroft 2y ago
    Potentially true for earlier adopters, but we do live in a bubble with a lot more awareness for AI than most. My dad would struggle to tell you what the acronym AI would even stand for, but he's a pretty big spender on household technology like TVs, and audio gear.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  > ...and they have no idea what that actually means. Subconsciously, many of them do "know" - it means that if you're an insecure and kinda clueless trend-chaser, then the 'AI' product is the one to buy.
patwolf 2y ago
I keep an eye on the market of small SaaS businesses for sale. Lately a majority are something like "A simple tool that uses AI to X". I immediately skip past any company like that because that tells me that 1. the company is very young and doesn't have enough history show clear revenue trends, and 2. the product is probably a thin wrapper over ChatGPT and has no moat among a dozen other tools that do the same thing.
hobs 2y ago
The simple truth is that for 99% of cases right now, you putting AI in your product means you are lazy. Your product team either has no idea or no control over your frothing execs. Your product will be outdated, replaced, or entirely canceled in 6-12 months and there's no reason I should build anything on top of it, or learn about it more. You are pretending to be a master of a technology your company barely understands and you give off big clown energy.
emsign 2y ago
Who would have thought. Don't believe the hype, especially if you have skin in the game.
benreesman 2y ago
This is a golden age of machine learning in a lot of ways: Karpathy and others like him will teach you how to do magical things every bit as well as the most elite experts via YouTube, Lambda Labs and others will rent you the same kinds of clusters used by the most elite experts if not quite at brute force money furnace scale, Meta will give you the same code and weights they use in production, Huggingface has 10 trillion token datasets of the highest quality hosted, Anyscale and others have open sourced infrastructure that will empower staggering scale for even moderately well-resourced builders. This should represent a Cambrian Explosion of delightful innovation on par with anything that followed the emergence of the personal computer, or the web, or the smartphone. And there is in fact a ton of amazingly cool stuff happening under the tidal wave of shitty monetization and financialization. But the robber barons and the hustlers and the opportunists have gone for the jugular on how quickly and completely this event can be politicized (the lobbying and laws and the speed and ruthlessness around them are an embarrassment), how quickly it can be “monetized” via LLM spam and pump-and-dump Mag7 cap manipulation, and how directly it can be converted into a minimum cost offshore customer servicing model-style aspirations where consumers get a broken chat bot instead of a person while simultaneously facing pressure, real or perceived, that their job is about to be replaced by some inferior “agent” that isn’t done. Machine learning is an amazing technology that should be strictly delightful in the hands of people who live to build awesome things that make people happy and prosperous and safe. “AI” has come to mean LLM spam, Thiel/Altman-style TESCREAL fascist politics, a massive surge in ubiquitous digital surveillance (which somehow still had headroom), and the next turn of the crank on the enshitification of modern life courtesy of the Battery Club. The socially useful and technically exciting future of AI is just waiting on the fall of the “AI” people. It’s so close.
ulfw 2y ago
AI has sadly become the new blockchain. Over hyped and consuming way to much power, attention and manpower for what it is with very little benefits to mankind. I guess that is what Tech is nowadays. So yes when I see 'AI' mentioned in products I shake my head before looking at details. Case in point: iOS 18.1 Beta. The Great Apple Intelligence. It does nothing. Just... you won't even notice it.
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
AI = blockchain 2.0
deleted 2y ago
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CivBase 2y ago
When I think of "AI" as a feature, I think * Nondeterministic * Untrustworthy * Uncertain * Marketing buzzword * Gimmick * Probably requires an external service or expensive hardware * Probably collecting my data If other people generally have the same perception, I'm not surprised it would drive people away.
pnt12 2y ago
This article is very forgiving towards tech companies, suggesting that users are techno phobic and the solution is to remove such labels. My perspective: consumers have seen new tech emerge a thousand times and are favoring reliability instead of the flavor of the month new tech, especially when it was designed to sell instead, not to solve real problems. This seems just like TVs, where more people long for dumber TVs with quality display - they are faster and more reliable than what the market of smart TVs is providing.
bijutoha 2y ago
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tobir 2y ago
I can't be the only one that actively avoid any YT videos, articles, apps etc when I see AI generated art.

343 points by breadwinner 2y ago

Marketing people is trying to shovel AI in everything in the sense of AI as in video games not as in AI as in General AI. It's the same as the Smart products era.

joegibbs 2y ago

I think avoid any kinds of buzzwords like AI, high tech, whatever and just focus on what it actually does, which is a lot more impressive. You can try to wow the customer with a bunch of words but it’s all fluff - and everyone is implementing AI now, and usually these “implementations” are ChatGPT with RAG on the docs or something else that everyone’s done before. What you end up getting is only slightly better than typing in chatgpt.com. If you’ve managed to get something that solves a problem just explain what it does to solve that.

nomoreusernames 2y ago
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CaptainFever 2y ago
Yeah, it's the same way that ".com" or "online" used to be buzzwords too, that nowadays just feel kind of cheap. If most things have AI, then simply saying you have AI doesn't really mean much. Sell the solution, not the technology, etc.
- cokeandpepsi 2y ago
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- jhbadger 2y ago
  Reminds me of ancient motels (with signage that probably hasn't been updated in decades) that proudly announce that their rooms are air conditioned and have color tv. Not that those aren't nice to have, but they are pretty much expected today.
  - ablation 2y ago
    The Kano Model in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model
fsckboy 2y ago
you don't realize it, but you are suggesting bog standard marketing advice: "Customers don't buy features, they buy benefits. You need to point out how your product benefits the customer." Around here that would correspond to "addressing pain points" "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole." - Ted Levitt HBS
- resonious 2y ago
  I guess even big corps like Microsoft need this reminder. GitHub's front page says "The world’s leading AI-powered developer platform."
  - smugglerFlynn 2y ago
    They probably ran A/B test and this wording led to increased registrations rate. Not sure why everyone instantly assumes product teams are not aware of marketings basics. It is consumers driving how the products evolve, not the other way around.
    - pnt12 2y ago
      I think that's a very forgiving perspective. Product teams are often wrong, and A/B tests can lead to inferior long term solutions. As always, it's best to criticize the idea, not the people.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  > "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole." Nah, speaking for plenty of guys, I'd say we want the drill. Maybe with an impact hammer too, of we can afford it. :)
rsynnott 2y ago
> which is a lot more impressive. Ah, well, there you run into a problem. Generally consumer ‘AI’ is pointless, and is there only because the markets are (or at least were; there are some indications that this may be ending) fixated on AI.
- mcv 2y ago
  There may well be valid applications of consumer AI, but I don't think we've seen any good ones yet. Most consumer products currently clearly use AI as a marketing buzzword. Most blatant example I've seen is Logitech's AI mouse.

pyeri 2y ago

At least when it comes to apps and software, the term "AI powered" automatically gives me the impression of "bloated crapware" these days! But I'm sure sales folks must be making good use of that term to get more projects and revenues from non-technical or less aware managers.

aikinai 2y ago
Crapware maybe, but I don’t see a correlation between AI and bloat. If anything, AI features are correlated with less bloated software since the AI is supposed to smooth over complexity. And some companies are using it to deliver real value. Adobe has been killing it with AI features. I switched back to Lightroom and Photoshop specifically for the new automasking, generative AI fill and such.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  I wouldn't deny that some companies are using it to deliver real value, but I feel like the typical case I see is barely above the level of the Logitech AI mouse. (For anyone who's not familiar, the mouse itself doesn't use AI in any way - it just has a built-in keybind to a ChatGPT integration, and of course is sold at a $10 premium to the same model with no AI button.)
- kube-system 2y ago
  Few in the consumer mass market have ever even opened photoshop before. The average person’s experience with “AI” is Siri telling them “I found this on the web” as a response to half of their questions. Or some streaming service suggesting a show they don’t want to watch. Or the Will Smith spaghetti meme. People who understand LLMs are on average fairly excited about what is happening recently. But those who don’t know what LLM stands for are skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.
  - l33t7332273 2y ago
    Many people who do know what LLM stands for (and could implement the architecture themselves) are also skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.

Tagbert 2y ago

It seems likely that if you can present a problem that customers have and a solution involving AI you’ll get a better response. It needs to be a real problem and the solution needs to be a better solution, though.

candiddevmike 2y ago

Wish it would start turning off investors so we can see other kinds of innovation.

imglorp 2y ago

Only some of the market is end users. The rest is businesses looking to replace headcount and they don't care what users think.

samtho 2y ago
They are starting to care about it after catching on to out how overstated the real world capabilities of AI are to actually replace headcount.

poikroequ 2y ago

AI isn't being marketed to consumers. AI is being marketed to investors. Regardless of whether or not it boosts sales, so long as it keeps driving up the stock price, they'll keep tossing around the word AI.

geuis 2y ago
Exactly. Marketing dollars come from investors. A big part of modern marketing for startups is spending tons of investor money to "grow" quickly. How long the fire burns doesn't matter, it's all about throwing dried out February Christmas trees onto the flames for quick bursts of flame.
jrflowers 2y ago
> AI isn't being marketed to consumers. This makes sense if you ignore every single example of AI-based features popping up all over consumer-facing services
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Believe me, I'm trying.
- maxbond 2y ago
  It's literally true that it is being marketed to consumers. GP was being somewhat poetic. Marketing to consumers is an instrumental goal in service of marketing to investors. The aim is to sell more stock to investors rather than more product to consumers. That being said, GP has made the implicit assumption that they can't market it to investors as AI and to consumers as something else, and if investor interest in AI doesn't ebb, then I expect they will find a way to do just that.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    AI is impossible to pitch to customers because its performance is not measurable. Could be good one day (remember Siri in 2017?) and crap the next. How would you pitch a feature with erratic behavior?

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happosai 2y ago

There is very few things in world that feel as repulsive as the glowing "AI" button in our Jira.

worthless-trash 2y ago
My instance doesn't have this, and I'm kinda glad that it has not been enabled.

TeeWEE 2y ago

90% of AI companies are just thin layers on top of an LLM, sometimes useful but they have all the problems LLM have (I will explain) For existing companies with AI features: more useful but mostly LLM bolted on with the same use cases. They can improve the product if used right. But for me it’s mostly often just a gimmick. The problem with LLMs: They mostly generate stuff they have seen and are bad as truly new stuff. They make mistakes You need to put time and energy in the review it. For stuff that transforms data it’s useful. Like rewriting a piece of text. It’s also useful for search queries on the corpus the LLM is trained on. It’s good at pattern recognition and lastly: human like voice interfaces. But for generating novel stuff: good luck reviewing it. People who just blindly copy paste the output of an LLM: that’s quite dangerous and potentially plain wrong. At least that’s my experience.

bane 2y ago
The fun bit is that the other 10% are just bog standard ML/DL models with the added benefit of being called "AI".

seydor 2y ago

Nice try, competitors

ks2048 2y ago

I thought for a few years at Apple keynote presentations, they were saying "machine learning" while Google was saying "AI" hundreds of times. I assumed because they thought "AI" had a privacy-invasion or anti-human connotation to it. But, then this year they came out with "Apple Intelligence", which people will just see as "AI". So, I guess they finally gave up on that.

rsynnott 2y ago
‘AI’ became a bit of a term non grata after the last big AI bubble popped in the late 90s, and people just called everything machine learning or similar. Google was merely more willing than Apple to try reviving it; up until recently very few companies dared use the term.
rahkiin 2y ago
I like they still do not really use AI but capitalized on the hype still. But they presented actionable features with intelligence behind it unlike many companies. With Apple Intelligence it can be whatever they want it to be. Could be ChatGPT, could be rule based. AI is now being linked to ChatGPT/conversational for many people
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
Weird how calling it Apple Intelligence is the same thinking as Jack Ma calling it "Alibaba Intelligence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulqRsqD0R64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulqRsqD0R64

stingraycharles 2y ago

Depends on who your customers are. In B2B anything that mentions “AI” still sells like hot cakes, especially enterprises where the person who buys (ie signs the contract) isn’t the person who uses the product. We’re currently doing a bunch of “AI at the Edge” projects, even though it’s hardly justified (“edge” in this case is just an on-prem datacenter), but you need to use buzzwords like these to convince executives.

BizarreByte 2y ago
> but you need to use buzzwords like these to convince executives. And yet we’re told execs are smarter than the rest of us and deserve to make so much more than we do. Someday I pray the executive class gets its comeuppance.

joduplessis 2y ago

Kinda hilarious seeing how hard people went to add "AI" to pretty much everything.

blotterfyi 2y ago

I was recently at a non-AI security conference and was passing through a hallway. Heard the term AI like 10 times in 10 minutes. Everytime that happens, I go back to that meme that got created after Google's IO when Sundar Pichai said "ai, ai, ai..." like 113 times.

senectus1 2y ago

every Wed I have a meeting with MS. I've started tallying every time co-pilot/AI/Chat-GPT is mentions. week before last its was 100 times in 34 mins, last week it was about 15 times. (not) looking forward to what this week will be.

azinman2 2y ago

> said Dogan Gursoy, one of the study’s authors and the Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of hospitality business management at Washington State University The irony… I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
In the future, every university chair is sponsored by Taco Bell.
- another-dave 2y ago
  And you get graded on a Bell curve
  - arcanemachiner 2y ago
    The Doritos® Locos Taco curve.
- chgs 2y ago
  And every politician sponsored by Carls Junior
- Findecanor 2y ago
  Except when they visit Europe for a conference, in which case it is Pizza Hut, because Taco Bell is not as well-established there.
  - jajko 2y ago
    Who eats there in Europe? Its mcdonalds of pizzas, the worst quality on the market, in this case a product that has little in common even in appearance with traditional pizza, more like hearthy focaccia. Less good, less healthy. Maybe good for late night drunks and stoners with nothing else still opened, but I know literally nobody who ever even mentioned eating there.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685

mrmetanoia 2y ago

The advertisements for co-pilot during the Olympics were laughably bad. An attempt at the sentimental and way overplayed trope of people using search/apps interwoven with touching life moments. In this one though, it was all a bunch of sports related achievements they had to really stretch to tie back to co-pilot. Someone using it to make a chart tracking heart rate - like I'd put any health data in that thing. Then you have Google writing letters for your children or showing how their camera AI integrations can help you live a lie. Frankly I'm glad to see data showing consumers are turned off. Oh! And then for the executives they have Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba talking about data security and productivity.

badgersnake 2y ago
I keep getting Intel ones with Molly Caudery, the pole vaulter who didn’t get over the bar once, explaining how AI helps her analyse her performance. It’s clearly working well for her.

openrisk 2y ago

Oh well, it was good while it lasted. But now we need a brand new hype to replace the malfunctioning AI neon sign. Maybe "neural meta computing", or "quantum hyper reasoners"? You see, a calm, factual, truthful and informed conversation of different technologies actual maturity, merrits and risks is in nobody's interest. /s

LeonB 2y ago
Here’s a technological concept that deserves all the hype in the world and will never get it: - reliability
- aglione 2y ago
  I'll help you: - relAIbility

n_ary 2y ago

For wiw, everything I used before on my Android now has an AI in it’s name(or screenshot) on PlayStore. So: * The AI Browser * AI note taking app * AI photo gallery * AI habit tracker * AI budget planner * AI music player * AI bank * AI hike planner * AI icon pack(wtf?!) * AI launcher * AI camera * AI news * AI PDF reader * AI comics viewer * AI Maps * AI food delivery * AI shopping experience * AI calorie tracker * AI video editor * AI backup * AI share * AI Authenticator(??) * AI partner * AI RoboAdviser(?) * AI Wallpapers * AI package tracker(?!) * AI health tracker And plenty other things I am forgetting. Even things that already had AI before are now new AI. This is getting out of hand.

goatlover 2y ago
This is basically Ant-Man and the Wasp, "Do you guys just put the word quantum in front of everything?".

firefoxd 2y ago

No one is dropping the term AI. There's only one culprit in all this: McKinsey. They are never the first to write the research, but when they do everyone follows. > McKinsey research estimates that gen AI could add to the economy between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually while increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent. When McKinsey releases a report, all product managers will present it in the next marketing slide and the ad budget will follow. If it fails to materialize, it's never their fault of course. The leader in market research is to blame. Google has no business advertising Gemini on TV. Like who is the target really? But an enterprise not embracing AI after the biggest Market Research firm says it's the future? I'm putting my money on Long Island Ice Tea AI next. [0]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/beyond-the-hype-capturing-the-potential-of-ai-and-gen-ai-in-tmt https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...

Animats 2y ago
> McKinsey research estimates that gen AI could add to the economy between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually while increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent. That's about the same number McKinsey used for "the metaverse" a few years back.
- goatlover 2y ago
  But it wasn't an AI Metaverse!
rsynnott 2y ago
> No one is dropping the term AI. Oh, they absolutely will. Like, they did _last_ time; in the early noughties the term ‘AI’ was poison and everything AI-adjacent got called ML. I suspect we’re already there again with consumers, though ‘AI’ may still work for investors for another year or so.
akgJAn 2y ago
Everyone associated with McKinsey fails upwards and enjoys a great career: https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biography-career-inconvenient-truth/ https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biograp... I have never heard of a sound advice originating from McKinsey that improved a company. It is hot air and promoted by the powerful who are in the right circles.

olliej 2y ago

They should avoid actually deploying the massively invasive and power hungry anti-feature as well

braza 2y ago

> A study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management in June found that describing a product as using AI lowers a customer’s intention to buy it. For the ones interested in the actual study instead the headline, this is the link for the original paper: Paper page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2... PDF: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040?needAccess=true https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...

nbzso 2y ago

It is nothing new. It is a nature of the economic models. We live in the bubble. The connection with reality is eroding progressively. You look at the information cycle you see opportunity, growth, futurism, promises, and social networks silos amplify what they find profitable. In reality: Economic instability, layoffs, wars, eroding of democracy everywhere, progressive government control, poverty, bad infrastructure, etc. Soon the reality will catch with tech bros and investors. Things are inflated to the brink. In this situation, AI marketing looks like a bad joke. ML is useful and applicable in a lot of use cases. But consumer AI fails time and time again to deliver the promised productivity boost and is expensive. So...

vero2 2y ago

Airports are a bellweather. This drives trends/investors/CEOs/middle managers. Living close to a large airport on a business city it was always - VMware - Azure - IBM etc Now-a-days - Get your employees co-pilot assisted Intel/Windows/etc to boost productivity

theGeatZhopa 2y ago

It's also turning me away. Not because I don't like or fear AI. It's because I know, the usages of AI in names of products is a sure sign for incompetent marketing, who doesn't know what to do and who is desperate. I wouldn't buy from marketing that is desperate to sell things after they dictated them.

vladvasiliu 2y ago
I never really bought the whole AI marketing spiels either, but I kinda understood the angle. They don't really know what they're selling, etc. But what really shocked me, was when people on the client side are asking suppliers if they're not working on anything AI-based, since everyone is doing it. But those people did always give me the vibe you're talking about: "they don't know what to do and are desperate". I guess my point is that maybe, at least some of the time, marketers aren't that stupid.
- lazide 2y ago
  Trying to convince your customers they’re stupid for wanting what they want is generally a pretty dumb marketing/sales tactic.
- theGeatZhopa 2y ago
  I didn't want to express that marketeers are stupid or so. In the opposite, it's an art to sell features. But having a product, like the mentioned washing machine in some thread here, and putting AI into the name is a sign of desperation for me. "We need a feature every other also might have.. let's put AI in the name and sell it twice the price" Anyway, when you start asking what AI is doing there, you'll realize it's just a simple sensor reading and thresholding (which AI is all about) I can't imagine a product with true AI - what is true AI? :)
resonious 2y ago
Yup. I've been seeing older products that I've used for awhile suddenly claim that they are "AI-powered" when I've never once used an AI feature of theirs (and often didn't even know they had one). Does not instill confidence.

atoav 2y ago

The thing is, I want a great product. Sometimes what I am looking for is a thing that involves LLMS, but most of the time what I hear is: telephones home and there is no way to stop it — and it probably doesn't even work half decent. Or the inclusion of the term AI is so ridiculous that you know nobody with reason works at that company.

Simon_ORourke 2y ago

What?! You mean that my company's half-baked quickly-on-the-bandwagon AI for AI's sake strategy might backfire? Shocking! Seriously though, it seems AI is being marketed towards investors, and that wherever it was included in a product it will be just to say it's on the product roadmap. If you're long enough in the game like myself you get to recognize these hype bubbles (CORBA anyone?) that claim to be about to take over the world and then fizzle out.

ImaCake 2y ago

A conference I helped organise had a lot of “AI” and “LLM” submissions. We had a blanket rule of ignoring all of them since they mostly sucked anyway. Meanwhile another conference I am going to has several “machine learning” talks which could have been titled something more informative like “image analysis” or “regression modelling”.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

In the same way, you should stop mentioning mobile, apps, the web, and other past over hyped stuff. That doesn't mean you should stop investing in doing those things well. It just means that you need to focus on the value you deliver to your customers through doing these things well. Everybody has an app. Having an app is not a distinguishing factor any more. In the eighties and nineties, companies slapped the word digital on just about anything. Especially on things that were very much analog. That doesn't mean computers flopped; they are very useful. It's a meaningless distinction to add the digital to a brand. AI is the same thing. It's a means to an end. You need to be talking about what you deliver with it. Not about how you deliver it. In the case of CNN that hosts this article, a lot of their content probably is at this point passing through some LLMs at this point. They don't have to advertise that of course. If they do their job right, you barely notice this. Arguably, they should be doing a lot more with AI than they are doing already. The news business is fiercely competitive. Margins are small, and they have to produce more content with fewer people. LLMs can help them do that.

nottorp 2y ago
> Having an app is not a distinguishing factor any more. Having an app is "fuck you, i don't want to install another app" these days...
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  It has been for decades. Also, people don’t know what the hell they want or are talking about - so often people tell me they have no apps on their phone, they don’t like apps, they’re bad and wrong - and then I see they’ve got Facebook, instagram, 10 candy crush clones, etc. “what about those?” “Those aren’t apps. Those are things.” My mother has total disdain for “social media users” yet spends six hours a day on Facebook. She doesn’t see it as social media. “It’s more of a virtual parlour” So yeah. People don’t know what the hell they want or are talking about.
  - will5421 2y ago
    They know what they want, just not what they’re talking about.

nottorp 2y ago

But isn't this a good thing? For the customers. It makes it easier for us to avoid hype based products and look for something that's actually useful to us... By all means, please use "AI" everywhere.

bankcust08385 2y ago

Let's play buzzword bingo, shall we?: Organic AI blockchain VR triple-play agile sticky growth-hacking methodology with an addressable market. Ubiquitous design and UX is better than throwing around nebulous technical cant 99.999% of people don't understand and are partially terrified of taking their jobs. While automating the navigation of ambiguous requests and delivering more open results with less exhaustive and tedious coding is cool, these features delivered to users have to provide useful advantages to be essential or they're just going to come off as "me too" bandwagon jumping. "Self-hosted", "open architecture", "cloud optional" are terms I like to see but only because I'm weirdo who tinkers with things sometimes but don't necessarily want to spend all of my time fixing or supporting fragile hacks.

deely3 2y ago
Please add gamification to the list, and big data.

austin-cheney 2y ago

As a customer, and a developer, every time I see AI as a feature in product marketing I immediately think bullshit hype train. All other merchandising is ignored. If that’s all you have in your sales pitch then you are failing.

hoseja 2y ago

, journo terrified of AI says.

broodbucket 2y ago
I often thought most journalists were terrible and could be easily automated away, and having seen the rise of LLM-produced content, I am happy to say I was wrong and that we need more journalists

throw310822 2y ago

> A study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management Haha. So they made a splash talking about AI. Well played.

goralph 2y ago

> Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management This seems more relevant to physical consumer goods I share the sentiment but I don’t think this is tech related.

photonthug 2y ago

Brands increasingly seem to feel nothing but contempt for their customers, so I’m not sure they care. In so many areas customers have no real ability to choose anyway, so what else would commerce look like? There’s no reason to think brands want AI because their customers want it.

idiocrat 2y ago

Because of the fAItigue the mentioning of AI will go away, but the orweillian precrAIme is here to stay.

camillomiller 2y ago

As a journalist, I would really wish to see a study saying that headlines like the one CNN used on this article drive readers away. I hate the “this generic thing you have to discover by reading past the first paragraph” trend so much.

bxguff 2y ago

because they tacked it on! If the product is carefully considered tech built from the ground up using AI or ML Those products would not drive people away. Now things that worked like search on google and social media sites is so bloated and inconsistent that your grandma would notice while touting AI powered search.

sklargh 2y ago

For founders chasing enterprise deals, a small piece of advice. In the Fortune 500s LLM chat UIs provided a canvas to which lawyers, privacy and procurement people painted all of their nightmares. So slapping AI on your product might help a little with investors but it might also slow down your first enterprise deal by a year.

0xTJ 2y ago

I hope it does. It should be a mark against a clothes dryer that it claims to use AI (unless it actually does, wherein I don't see a possible benefit, and wouldn't buy that anyways). Avoid buying products that pointlessly market themselves as "AI"; vote with your wallet to punish companies for bad behaviour. If they're doing it for the investors, make tacking on garbage buzzwords like "AI" hurt their bottom line.

elif 2y ago
What's the problem with AI washing machines? It analyses the laundry type and size to inform itself on how much detergent to use, analyses the laundry during the wash to know when it is clean enough, monitors the moisture level in the clothes to know when the drying is finished.. it's as if a person is there micromanaging the washing machine.. how is that not an artificial agent?
- mdorazio 2y ago
  Exactly zero of that is AI. You've described an extremely basic control loop with a few simple sensors, a lookup table, and some if-then statements.
  - elif 2y ago
    That might be how you would implement it, are you refusing to concede that Samsung could have implemented it better than your strawman implementation? What is your standard for intelligence? My washing machine is already better at doing laundry than I am (even if I was in total control of a machine with identical capabilities), why is that not good enough for you?
    - oe 2y ago
      I think the point was that every new washing machine already does these things (measures how much detergent to use, checks when the water is clean enough etc.) without any AI. It’s not a very difficult problem domain.

Jamustico 2y ago

Same happen to crypto. I'm an huge crypto enthusiast, but whenever I see the term "crypto" being used somewhere I just cringe.

lumb63 2y ago

I know the “AI label” drives me away. It means the product is unreliable and a black box. The “AI” label also indicates the solution is way over complicated and simpler ways to improve the product have been ignored. For instance, Confluence now has an “AI” chatbot. Search is still substantially worse than grep.

javier123454321 2y ago
Yeah, for example, nerdwallet did an AI search/ask chat GPT about finances feature. I believe that not a single customer asked for their budgeting software to have an AI chatbot.
- tail_exchange 2y ago
  But how else would they stamp an AI label to their product? Bolt a chatbot onto it, say you are AI-powered, and profit!
  - jerf 2y ago
    It's even worse than that. It's "bolt a chatbot on to your product, force it into people's workflow against their will, claim huge usage numbers on your quarterly result calls, stock price goes up". Not profits, just stock price. The evidence that anybody who isn't "selling shovels" has made any significant money yet with AI remains thin. I can't remember if it was Google or Facebook, but in the last earnings season one of them claimed directly that AI has improved their advertising revenue, but the improvement was not terribly out of line from what these companies have been doing for a while (not like suddenly they popped out a revenue triple, it was not obviously out of line with their normal reporting), and I wouldn't be surprised they were doing exactly what I said in my first paragraph. I did not find their claim terribly compelling, even if it was completely true and not just a sop to the stock market. Nobody else is even claiming that AI has increased profits. I'm sure there's some startups with some profits, maybe even very exciting amounts of profit for a startup, but nothing that would move the needle for established companies. In fact we seem to already be in the consolidation phase for the industry, the startups are starting to go under. If we use that as a timer for where we are in the hype cycle, this is underperforming compared to other bubbles; at this point in the dot com crash, while the sector was heavily overinvested it was also quite obvious to a calm observer not panicking about their portfolio that there was definitely a there there, it just wasn't ready to sustain that much investment. There is so far a lot less there there with AI. This hype is going to prove disastrous for the entire technology, I fear. If it was treated as a more normal technology, it would improve, it would be experimented with, companies would learn how to use it, failures would be shaken out and successes doubled down on, and in 3-10 years it would be a healthy industry making reliable, good money with a bright future for growth. But the way the stock market went absolutely ape shit, now the bar is, in roughly 6-12 months if AI has not quintupled the profit margin of all of the already-largest companies on Earth, it is a failure, and so are those companies. We've got a lot of people now with all the incentives in the world to blatently lie about their progress because as soon as they are truthful they become personally bankrupt as their stock options tank. Not because of any particular aspect of AI, except that it wasn't a miracle "drop it into any process instantly see quintupled profits", and I'm not inclined to be too annoyed at any technology for failing to be that. And it could take AI down with it. Again. I'd expect the resulting "AI winter" to be relatively short this time because the technology really is becoming promising, but the medium-term prospects for the tech are probably a lot dimmer than they theoretically should be because of this disproportionate frenzy.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

AI drives me away because I don't want to support the automation of creative tasks. Even if the application isn't replacing creative people, I don't want to support any of it. To hell with AI!

crowcroft 2y ago

It's not about whether AI signals if the quality is bad or good. It's that for most people they see 'AI' and they have no idea what that actually means. Sell benefits not features.

classified 2y ago
> they see 'AI' and they have no idea what that actually means. To be fair, the providers don't know either. At the moment enough users are crazy enough to buy that as a feature. Let's see how long this will last.
- crowcroft 2y ago
  Potentially true for earlier adopters, but we do live in a bubble with a lot more awareness for AI than most. My dad would struggle to tell you what the acronym AI would even stand for, but he's a pretty big spender on household technology like TVs, and audio gear.
bell-cot 2y ago
> ...and they have no idea what that actually means. Subconsciously, many of them do "know" - it means that if you're an insecure and kinda clueless trend-chaser, then the 'AI' product is the one to buy.

patwolf 2y ago

I keep an eye on the market of small SaaS businesses for sale. Lately a majority are something like "A simple tool that uses AI to X". I immediately skip past any company like that because that tells me that 1. the company is very young and doesn't have enough history show clear revenue trends, and 2. the product is probably a thin wrapper over ChatGPT and has no moat among a dozen other tools that do the same thing.

hobs 2y ago

The simple truth is that for 99% of cases right now, you putting AI in your product means you are lazy. Your product team either has no idea or no control over your frothing execs. Your product will be outdated, replaced, or entirely canceled in 6-12 months and there's no reason I should build anything on top of it, or learn about it more. You are pretending to be a master of a technology your company barely understands and you give off big clown energy.

emsign 2y ago

Who would have thought. Don't believe the hype, especially if you have skin in the game.

benreesman 2y ago

This is a golden age of machine learning in a lot of ways: Karpathy and others like him will teach you how to do magical things every bit as well as the most elite experts via YouTube, Lambda Labs and others will rent you the same kinds of clusters used by the most elite experts if not quite at brute force money furnace scale, Meta will give you the same code and weights they use in production, Huggingface has 10 trillion token datasets of the highest quality hosted, Anyscale and others have open sourced infrastructure that will empower staggering scale for even moderately well-resourced builders. This should represent a Cambrian Explosion of delightful innovation on par with anything that followed the emergence of the personal computer, or the web, or the smartphone. And there is in fact a ton of amazingly cool stuff happening under the tidal wave of shitty monetization and financialization. But the robber barons and the hustlers and the opportunists have gone for the jugular on how quickly and completely this event can be politicized (the lobbying and laws and the speed and ruthlessness around them are an embarrassment), how quickly it can be “monetized” via LLM spam and pump-and-dump Mag7 cap manipulation, and how directly it can be converted into a minimum cost offshore customer servicing model-style aspirations where consumers get a broken chat bot instead of a person while simultaneously facing pressure, real or perceived, that their job is about to be replaced by some inferior “agent” that isn’t done. Machine learning is an amazing technology that should be strictly delightful in the hands of people who live to build awesome things that make people happy and prosperous and safe. “AI” has come to mean LLM spam, Thiel/Altman-style TESCREAL fascist politics, a massive surge in ubiquitous digital surveillance (which somehow still had headroom), and the next turn of the crank on the enshitification of modern life courtesy of the Battery Club. The socially useful and technically exciting future of AI is just waiting on the fall of the “AI” people. It’s so close.

ulfw 2y ago

AI has sadly become the new blockchain. Over hyped and consuming way to much power, attention and manpower for what it is with very little benefits to mankind. I guess that is what Tech is nowadays. So yes when I see 'AI' mentioned in products I shake my head before looking at details. Case in point: iOS 18.1 Beta. The Great Apple Intelligence. It does nothing. Just... you won't even notice it.

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

AI = blockchain 2.0

deleted 2y ago

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CivBase 2y ago

When I think of "AI" as a feature, I think * Nondeterministic * Untrustworthy * Uncertain * Marketing buzzword * Gimmick * Probably requires an external service or expensive hardware * Probably collecting my data If other people generally have the same perception, I'm not surprised it would drive people away.

pnt12 2y ago

This article is very forgiving towards tech companies, suggesting that users are techno phobic and the solution is to remove such labels. My perspective: consumers have seen new tech emerge a thousand times and are favoring reliability instead of the flavor of the month new tech, especially when it was designed to sell instead, not to solve real problems. This seems just like TVs, where more people long for dumber TVs with quality display - they are faster and more reliable than what the market of smart TVs is providing.

bijutoha 2y ago

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tobir 2y ago

I can't be the only one that actively avoid any YT videos, articles, apps etc when I see AI generated art.