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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
by 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 agoExactly. 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 agoBelieve me, I'm trying.
- maxbond 2y agoIt'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 agoAI 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?
- Jedd 2y agoHang on - 87% of end-customer marketing is already aspirational, potential quality (of life) - over measurable, quantifiable - outcomes. To your second question, I believe a popular adjective might be 'invigorating'.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- layer8 2y ago> How would you pitch a feature with erratic behavior? As "creative", "diverse", and "enriching". ;)
- bakugo 2y agoThey are popping up all over consumer-facing services because investors want them, not because consumers want them.
- jrflowers 2y agoAI being literally marketed to consumers in order to court investors is not the same thing as “AI is not being marketed to consumers” though
- fullshark 2y agoOP was trying to be clever (i.e. the key audience for this marketing is actually investors), most everyone else understood their meaning I believe.
- Yeul 2y agoYep I have Edge here on my phone and I quote "the AI browser". So yes I do see it in marketing.
- petabyt 2y agoBig investors get a boner when they think about AI. So founders get FOMO and shove it into everything.
- nineteen999 2y agoNot that much different from the recent crypto bubble TBH
- diego_sandoval 2y agoIf it comes back to the "bubble" price and surpasses it less than 3 years later, was it really a bubble?
- eddiewithzato 2y agostarted with crypto -> blockchain -> NFT -> AI what’s the next big bubble?
- glitchc 2y agoBI aka Business Intelligence of course /s
- rsynnott 2y agoYou missed metaverses. Also there was another AI one; there was a smallish computer vision oriented bubble early last decade. Main product was a lot of money wasted on putative self-driving cars, but there was other stuff.
- prmoustache 2y agoI don't think metaverses really interested anyone appart from Facebook in recent years. Who invested in those really? I think everybody remember that all but a few addicts got quickly bored of second life in the mid 00's and it was not worth trying a second time.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
- Gigachad 2y agoHuh? Samsung has adverts all over the place about how their phones have AI. They don’t even talk about what it does. Just that they have AI.
- quicklime 2y agoEven their washing machines have AI!
- synicalx 2y agoCan't wait for my washing machine to be able to make an API call to OpenAI so it can worked out how best to tackle the stain on my undies. We really are living in the future.
- jajko 2y agoNo internet / dns fail / openai failed patching and bam! Whole world wears dirty clothes. I hope EU will make this illegal if it isnt yet, they seem to be the only real power these days not giving a fuck about revenues of corporations in the first place when deciding stuff.
- netsharc 2y ago"This stain again, week after week? Ordering fibrous cereal from Amazon...".
- maxbond 2y agoI've seen this and it's very silly. Every step where the machine makes an automated decision, it displays a message like, "using AI to xyz." I have to imagine the "AI" to determine how long the cycle should be is a linear function of some metric like weight. But I suppose you could view that as a neural network with a single neuron.
- animuchan 2y agoMoreover, any hardcoded behavior can be seen as a neural net with no neurons! Maybe the real AI was the friends we made along the way.
- bushbaba 2y agoYou’d be shocked at how brain dead the csuite who influence buying decisions can be. Oh walstreet cares about ai. What’s our ai plan. Internal team, we are buying a new AI dev product that’ll reduce headcount needs by 10%. Csuite sounds great!
- jameshart 2y agoI don’t watch a lot of broadcast TV but had some live TV up during the Olympics. Every ad break included ads for Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Salesforce Einstein. We are in a full on AI product marketing cycle.
- Terr_ 2y agoTrue, but there's a lot of room for ulterior motives there too. I mean, some of it may be about getting end-users to pay for AI-thingies, but running the ads can also be seen as investor-posturing even if if it doesn't say "buy our stock", and there may be a corporate goal of boosting the (free) usage-numbers in order to present that to investors, etc.
- rchaud 2y agoWe saw the same thing with crypto ads dominating the Super Bowl a couple of years ago and gambling apps during the NBA playoffs. TV advertising for major sporting events is a "flex" as so few companies can afford the cost of a national ad slot. The ones that do usually have money to burn from investors.
- Terr_ 2y agoTo be fair, the line between crypto speculator and crypto customer is very thin indeed. :P
- xbmcuser 2y agoIt is still not marketed to you the same way the millions of ads you see of prescription drugs that can only be prescribed by doctors are marketed on tv.
- sph 2y agoOf course the drug ads are marketed to you, so you go and get a prescription from your doctor. Likewise, everybody and their dog has ChatGPT installed and think of AI as this magical thing that's gonna change the world, so they are potential indirect customers.
- Log_out_ 2y agoArent the Investors the main consumers for software goods by now? The customer consumer (cc) is just a stage to mass adoption on the way towards en-shitification, basically some late stage fracking process chemical, needed yes, but not a decisionmaker when it comes to drilling.
- evilfred 2y agoevery time I see the AI box in Clickup I cringe. it is being marketed to users we just all avoid it, as the story says.
- sergioisidoro 2y agoYesterday I went to buy an electric toothbrush and some were marketed as having "AI". This thing is reaching astronomical bandwagon proportions.
- jajko 2y agoWell at least you can switch your crypto mining toothbrush with AI infused one that will analyze movements of your hands and once sold to insurance brokers conclude you have an old injury and are a risky driver raising your insurance premiums.
- taneq 2y agoCurrent model massage chairs are marketed as having AI (which I think actually just means they have pressure sensors which they use to detect your height/weight... but who knows these days?)
- glimshe 2y agoYesterday I went to a college entry prep seminar for my kid and they were selling a "personalized preparation plan created by algorithms and AI"
- AbstractH24 2y agoIt’s a catch-22 You need to put AI to raise money or appeal to a broad swath of consumers, but educated consumers and enterprise buyers are increasingly rolling their eyes at it.
- b3ing 2y agoExactly, I had an interview at some company last year that had AI in their name and got a million invested in them. I read their website and saw nothing that really showcased AI it seemed like just something you could code with basic filtering. The interview felt like I was consulting them on what to do next and I probably should of been paid.