42 ms·

Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers

Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.

voidfunc 11mo ago
Because the investor class is drunk on their own wine.
Ancapistani 11mo ago
> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Sure! Google began investing heavily in AI (LLMs, actually) to catch up to the other frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad revenue). They recognized this, and set about becoming a leader in the emerging field. Is it not better to be a leader in the nascent industry that is poised to kill your profitability? This is the same approach that Google took with smartphones. They saw Apple as a threat not because they had a product that was directly competing, but because they recognized that allowing Apple to monopolize mobile computing would put them in a position to take Google’s ad revenue — or allow them to extract rent in the form of payments to ensure Apple didn’t direct their users to a competing service. Android was not initially intended to be a revenue source, at least not most importantly. It was intended to limit the problem that Apple represented. Later, once Google had a large part of the market, they found ways to monetize the platform via both their ad network and an app store. AI is no different. If Google does nothing, they lose. If they catch up and take the lead, they limit the size of the future threat and if all goes well, will be able to monetize their newfound market share down the road - but monetization is a problem for future Google. Today’s Google’s problem is getting the market share.
- m463 11mo ago
  I like the duck duck go AI summaries...
- keyle 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tempestn 11mo ago
    It was a well reasoned response to the question posed. Not everything is AI, and not all "walls of text" are equal.
    - Ancapistani 11mo ago
      I didn’t see the comment, but I assume they were accusing me of generating it. For what it’s worth, I didn’t use AI at all for it. I just tend to sound like an LLM, likely because I have ADHD and grew up very rural (most of my vocabulary and grammar from reading). I also tend to use a lot of parenthetical phrases, semi-colons, and lists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - FloorEgg 11mo ago
    Maybe consider trying to follow the HN guidelines?
- schnitzelstoat 11mo ago
  Yeah, like imagine if the LLM's don't advance that much, the agentic stuff doesn't really take off etc. Even in this conservative case, ChatGPT could seriously erode Google Search revenues. That alone would be a massive disruption and Google wants to ensure they end up as the Google in that scenario and not the Lycos, AltaVista, AskJeeves etc. etc.
  - b112 11mo ago
    But what Google is doing, is like what Firefox did when Chrome came out. Panicking. Panicking, and therefore making horrible design and product choices. Google has made their main search engine output utter and complete junk. It's just terrible. If they didn't have 'web' search, I'd never be able to use it. In almost every search for the last month, normal search results in horrible matches. Switch to web? Bam! First result. Not web? The same perfect result might be 3 or 4 pages deep. If that. (I am comparing web results in both cases, and ignoring the also broken 80% of the pages of AI junk.) In an attempt to compete, they're literally driving people to use ChatGPT for search in droves. They could compete, and do so without this panicky disaster of a response.
Octoth0rpe 11mo ago
> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? I'll take a stab at this. It's not 100% clear to me which product you're referring to, so I'll try to answer as if the product is something that already has customers, and the maker of the product is shoving AI into it. The rationale is that the group you're trying to convince that you're doing a good job is your shareholders or investors, not your actual customers. You can justify some limited customer attrition by noting that your competitors are doing the same thing, and that maybe if you shove the _right_ AI features into the product, you'll win those customers back. I'm not saying it's a _good_ rationale, but that seems to be what's at play in many cases.
- strange_quark 11mo ago
  Correct. More succinctly, this what happens when the share price becomes the product.
- globalnode 11mo ago
  i like this reason, and the 'dont do nothing' sibling comment. both make sense to me.
- willis936 11mo ago
  This is what I feel is the case. That is putting a lot of customers on the table. Valve / GabeN get it. In 2025 they make a marketing point about how their hardware runs arch and you can put whatever software you want on it. Valve is positioned to eat Microsoft's and Google's lunch if they're not careful. While chasing the fear of losing customers they are actively losing customers.
  - Blamklmo 11mo ago
    [dead]
rockemsockem 11mo ago
If you're talking about all of AI with your statement I think you may need to reconcile that opinion with the fact that chat GPT alone has almost 1 billion daily users. Clearly lots of people derive enormous value from AI. If there's something more specific and different you were referring to I'd love to hear what it is.
- eCa 11mo ago
  I’m probably an outlier: I use chatgpt/gemini for specific purposes, but ai summaries on eg google search or youtube gives me negative value (I never read them and they take up space).
  - rockemsockem 11mo ago
    I agree about the summaries! I think AI is applied in a lot of bad ways ATM although TBH I've heard some people like the summaries
    - duskdozer 11mo ago
      I can't say I find them 100% useless - though I'd rather they not pop up by default - and I understand why people like them so much. They let people type in a question and get a confident and definitive answer all in natural language, which is what it seems like the average person has tried to do all along with search engines. The issue is that they think whatever it spits out is 100% true and factual, which is scary.
- kergonath 11mo ago
  > Clearly lots of people derive enormous value from AI. I don’t really see this. Lots of people like freebies, but the value aspect is less clear. AFAIK, none of these chatbots are profitable. You would not see nearly as many users if they had to actually pay for the thing.
  - jcgrillo 11mo ago
    In the article Pichai is quoted saying: > "It doesn't matter whether you want to be a teacher [or] a doctor. All those professions will be around, but the people who will do well in each of those professions are people who learn how to use these tools." Bullshit. Citation very much needed. It's a shame--a shameful stain on the profession--that journalists don't respond critically to such absurd nonsense and ask the obvious question: are you fucking lying?. It is absolutely not true that AI tools make doctors more effective, or teachers, or programmers. It would be very convenient to people like Pichai and Scam Altman, but that don't make it so.
kjkjadksj 11mo ago
The golden goose is not you or I. It is our boss who will buy this junk for us and expect us to integrate it into our workflows or be shown the door. It is the broccoli headed kids who don’t even have to crack open cliffnotes to shirk their academic responsibilities anymore. It is universities that are trying to “keep up” by forcing an AI prompting class as a prerequisite for most majors. These groups represent a lot of people and a lot of money. It doesn’t have to work. It just has to sell and become entrenched enough. And by all metrics that is what is happening. A self fulfilling prophecy, no different than your org buying redundant enterprise software from all the major vendors today.
- isoprophlex 11mo ago
  > broccoli headed kids now that there's a prime quality rare insult anyway i totally agree with your reasoning. one might as well ask "why is MS Teams so bad? it's bloated, slow, buggy, nasty to use from a UX pov... yet it's everywhere" this shitware -- ms teams, llm slopguns, whatever -- never had to work, they just have to sell.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
macNchz 11mo ago
There are at least a few stories from the 90s where companies that readily could have invested in “getting online” instead decided that it would only harm their existing business. The hype at the time was extraordinary to be sure, but after the dust settled the internet did change the shape of the world. Nobody can really know what things will look like in 10 years, but if you have the capital to deploy and any conviction at all that this might be a sea-change moment, it seems foolish to not pursue it.
- boxerab 11mo ago
  Pascal's Wager for tech.
  - krige 11mo ago
    More like it's edgy cousin, the basilisk.
- Frieren 11mo ago
  > Nobody can really know what things will look like in 10 years, 100% true. Do not invest trillions on such an uncertainty in the long term is always a bad investment. > but if you have the capital to deploy and any conviction at all that this might be a sea-change moment, it seems foolish to not pursue it. Gamblers argument: "But what if this is the winning ticket?"
  - sampullman 11mo ago
    Then aren't most forms of investment based on a "gambler's argument"? A risky investment is obviously akin to gambling, but to get things built and make a profit you have no other choice.
    - amelius 11mo ago
      > Then aren't most forms of investment based on a "gambler's argument"? Are you now equating an investor with some guy in a casino? Sorry, but that seems like a stretch.
shalmanese 11mo ago
What evidence do you have that it's driving consumers away from the product? The people who bother to say anything on the internet are the extreme dedicated minority and are often not representative of a silent majority. Unless you have access to analytics, you can't make this inference.
- frm88 11mo ago
  https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/ https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans... That's only one article and with only a small focus: Americans only. U.S. adults are generally pessimistic about AI’s effect on people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships: 53% say AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively, compared with 16% who say it will improve this.... Regarding your skepticism about the loss of trust: https://publicpolicy.cornell.edu/masters-blog/what-americans-really-think-about-ai-algorithms-public-confidence-and-transparency-in-government/ https://publicpolicy.cornell.edu/masters-blog/what-americans... One of the most consistent themes in the research is fear of misinformation. In an era where AI-generated content can be nearly indistinguishable from authentic material, the potential for deception is enormous, and people know it. A full 76% of Americans say they are concerned about AI tools producing false or misleading information.
  - NeutralCrane 11mo ago
    That doesn’t say anything about pushing people away from using products with AI though. People are enormously negative about the effects of social media, and yet social media use is incredibly pervasive and sticky.
    - frm88 11mo ago
      I thought that the loss of trust would be self-explanatory in that regard? You don't buy stuff you don't trust, yes? Anyways: https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-products-ai https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-pro... Researchers have found that including the words “artificial intelligence” in product marketing is a major turn-off for consumers, suggesting a growing backlash and disillusionment with the tech — and that startups trying to cram “AI” into their product are actually making a grave error.
raincole 11mo ago
I don't know which product you're even talking about. If you mean AI Overview, you really need to cite the source of this claim: > seeing that it drives consumers away from your product Because every single source I can find claims that Google search grew in 2024[0]. HN is not a good focus group for a product that targets billions of people. [0]: For example https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-growth-39040.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-growth-39040.html but feel free to provide a more credible source that claims the opposite.
- devsda 11mo ago
  One can also interpret the growth as a failure from product p.o.v though it drives views. With AI summaries being hit or miss, we may say users now need to do 20% more searches to find what they are looking for. Numbers aren't always a good proxy for customer satisfaction.
  - hgomersall 11mo ago
    This was literally their policy. Make the searches worse so people search more. https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/ https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/
    - DeathArrow 11mo ago
      That's pure genius. Make cars break faster so you can sell more cars.
tammer 11mo ago
While you & I may find shoehorning LLMs into every nook & cranny distasteful, I worry Marl may think differently https://open.substack.com/pub/nothinghuman/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user https://open.substack.com/pub/nothinghuman/p/the-tyranny-of-...
elif 11mo ago
People are scared of change which threatens their occupation, hobbies, and sense of human purpose. Even if that change is wildly profitable for megacorps in the long run.
tdeck 11mo ago
> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Hey now, Google Plus was more than a decade ago. I didn't like it either, but maybe it's time to move on? I think they learned their lesson.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  Stadia was pretty recent, though.
  - tdeck 11mo ago
    Did Stadia do anything that adversely affected already successful products? I thought it had limited collateral damage.
moi2388 11mo ago
What I think: - get customers used to using AI by “gently” cough nudging them towards this in all products. - get experience and data for your LLMs and AI dev teams regarding what works and what doesn’t - Bet on AI becoming good enough that people will use this as their entry to the Web, Media and software - become the largest player of these AI apps, so that you can inject ads again
- Blamklmo 11mo ago
  [dead]
brainwad 11mo ago
Eastman Kodak tried your implied proposed strategy, of ignoring technological developments that undermine their core product. It didn't go so well. Naturally technology companies have learned from this and other past mistakes.
- DeathArrow 11mo ago
  Kodak developed a prototype digital camera in 1975. In 1990 they started selling digital cameras. They manufactured their own sensors. How did they ignore technological advancements?
  - Iulioh 11mo ago
    Having the shinyest toys is useless if you don't play with them. They had the tech but didn't see the danger in it, they belived that the lower quality digital camera would fail and investing in them would mean exploring a new market and they choose the safe corporate move, buisness as usual. Turns out that low quality but way more pratical and cheaper on the long run really sells
    - lizknope 11mo ago
      https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/908575-one-of-job-s-business-rules-was-to-never-be-afraid https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/908575-one-of-job-s-busines... “One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.” Kodak did sell digital cameras but they were so scared of protecting their film business I don't think they went all in on digital and let the other camera companies take over.
- pfannkuchen 11mo ago
  I’m not sure this is the whole story. Kodak operated in a region that was a manufacturing and technology hub until the mid 1900s. The region started to decline significantly in the 1960s. By the 1990s it was basically a ruins compared to the 1950s. So by the time Kodak made this strategic mistake, I imagine they already would have had a hard time recruiting talent into that obviously dying region for a decade or so, and many people who were there already were actively leaving the region by that time. I suspect that in the counterfactual where the region stayed as it was in the 1950s in terms of economic prosperity, Kodak probably could have successfully played catch up once it was clear where the game was going. So yes they made a strategic mistake, but they did so while simultaneously “brain drain” bleeding out due to other unrelated factors.
terminalshort 11mo ago
> seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust Where is your evidence for this part of your claim?
satvikpendem 11mo ago
> If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will. - Steve Jobs
- marcosdumay 11mo ago
  Eh... That's only worth anything if the new version of "you" is better than the original. I'm certain Jobs thought there's no need to point that detail, because nobody still living¹ would be dumb enough not to understand it implicitly. Too bad that we have evidence otherwise. 1 - At the worst case, selection bias should make it true.
  - satvikpendem 11mo ago
    I'm not really sure what you're saying. He was talking specifically about the iPhone vs the iPod, and anyway, people buy inferior products all the time in tech history so there's no guarantee a better product would succeed anyway.
    - marcosdumay 11mo ago
      It's at least something people prefer. There's no way he even thought people would use that rationale for taking products people like (or dislike less) out of the market to cannibalize the market by force with something people don't like (or dislike more).
      - satvikpendem 11mo ago
        Good thing no one is talking about that sort of thing then. In the context of Google, either they implement LLMs themselves or another company will come and do so in order to cannibalize Google.

voidfunc 11mo ago

Because the investor class is drunk on their own wine.

Ancapistani 11mo ago

> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Sure! Google began investing heavily in AI (LLMs, actually) to catch up to the other frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad revenue). They recognized this, and set about becoming a leader in the emerging field. Is it not better to be a leader in the nascent industry that is poised to kill your profitability? This is the same approach that Google took with smartphones. They saw Apple as a threat not because they had a product that was directly competing, but because they recognized that allowing Apple to monopolize mobile computing would put them in a position to take Google’s ad revenue — or allow them to extract rent in the form of payments to ensure Apple didn’t direct their users to a competing service. Android was not initially intended to be a revenue source, at least not most importantly. It was intended to limit the problem that Apple represented. Later, once Google had a large part of the market, they found ways to monetize the platform via both their ad network and an app store. AI is no different. If Google does nothing, they lose. If they catch up and take the lead, they limit the size of the future threat and if all goes well, will be able to monetize their newfound market share down the road - but monetization is a problem for future Google. Today’s Google’s problem is getting the market share.

m463 11mo ago
I like the duck duck go AI summaries...
keyle 11mo ago
[flagged]
- tempestn 11mo ago
  It was a well reasoned response to the question posed. Not everything is AI, and not all "walls of text" are equal.
  - Ancapistani 11mo ago
    I didn’t see the comment, but I assume they were accusing me of generating it. For what it’s worth, I didn’t use AI at all for it. I just tend to sound like an LLM, likely because I have ADHD and grew up very rural (most of my vocabulary and grammar from reading). I also tend to use a lot of parenthetical phrases, semi-colons, and lists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- FloorEgg 11mo ago
  Maybe consider trying to follow the HN guidelines?
schnitzelstoat 11mo ago
Yeah, like imagine if the LLM's don't advance that much, the agentic stuff doesn't really take off etc. Even in this conservative case, ChatGPT could seriously erode Google Search revenues. That alone would be a massive disruption and Google wants to ensure they end up as the Google in that scenario and not the Lycos, AltaVista, AskJeeves etc. etc.
- b112 11mo ago
  But what Google is doing, is like what Firefox did when Chrome came out. Panicking. Panicking, and therefore making horrible design and product choices. Google has made their main search engine output utter and complete junk. It's just terrible. If they didn't have 'web' search, I'd never be able to use it. In almost every search for the last month, normal search results in horrible matches. Switch to web? Bam! First result. Not web? The same perfect result might be 3 or 4 pages deep. If that. (I am comparing web results in both cases, and ignoring the also broken 80% of the pages of AI junk.) In an attempt to compete, they're literally driving people to use ChatGPT for search in droves. They could compete, and do so without this panicky disaster of a response.

Octoth0rpe 11mo ago

> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? I'll take a stab at this. It's not 100% clear to me which product you're referring to, so I'll try to answer as if the product is something that already has customers, and the maker of the product is shoving AI into it. The rationale is that the group you're trying to convince that you're doing a good job is your shareholders or investors, not your actual customers. You can justify some limited customer attrition by noting that your competitors are doing the same thing, and that maybe if you shove the _right_ AI features into the product, you'll win those customers back. I'm not saying it's a _good_ rationale, but that seems to be what's at play in many cases.

strange_quark 11mo ago
Correct. More succinctly, this what happens when the share price becomes the product.
globalnode 11mo ago
i like this reason, and the 'dont do nothing' sibling comment. both make sense to me.
willis936 11mo ago
This is what I feel is the case. That is putting a lot of customers on the table. Valve / GabeN get it. In 2025 they make a marketing point about how their hardware runs arch and you can put whatever software you want on it. Valve is positioned to eat Microsoft's and Google's lunch if they're not careful. While chasing the fear of losing customers they are actively losing customers.
- Blamklmo 11mo ago
  [dead]

rockemsockem 11mo ago

If you're talking about all of AI with your statement I think you may need to reconcile that opinion with the fact that chat GPT alone has almost 1 billion daily users. Clearly lots of people derive enormous value from AI. If there's something more specific and different you were referring to I'd love to hear what it is.

eCa 11mo ago
I’m probably an outlier: I use chatgpt/gemini for specific purposes, but ai summaries on eg google search or youtube gives me negative value (I never read them and they take up space).
- rockemsockem 11mo ago
  I agree about the summaries! I think AI is applied in a lot of bad ways ATM although TBH I've heard some people like the summaries
  - duskdozer 11mo ago
    I can't say I find them 100% useless - though I'd rather they not pop up by default - and I understand why people like them so much. They let people type in a question and get a confident and definitive answer all in natural language, which is what it seems like the average person has tried to do all along with search engines. The issue is that they think whatever it spits out is 100% true and factual, which is scary.
kergonath 11mo ago
> Clearly lots of people derive enormous value from AI. I don’t really see this. Lots of people like freebies, but the value aspect is less clear. AFAIK, none of these chatbots are profitable. You would not see nearly as many users if they had to actually pay for the thing.
- jcgrillo 11mo ago
  In the article Pichai is quoted saying: > "It doesn't matter whether you want to be a teacher [or] a doctor. All those professions will be around, but the people who will do well in each of those professions are people who learn how to use these tools." Bullshit. Citation very much needed. It's a shame--a shameful stain on the profession--that journalists don't respond critically to such absurd nonsense and ask the obvious question: are you fucking lying?. It is absolutely not true that AI tools make doctors more effective, or teachers, or programmers. It would be very convenient to people like Pichai and Scam Altman, but that don't make it so.

kjkjadksj 11mo ago

The golden goose is not you or I. It is our boss who will buy this junk for us and expect us to integrate it into our workflows or be shown the door. It is the broccoli headed kids who don’t even have to crack open cliffnotes to shirk their academic responsibilities anymore. It is universities that are trying to “keep up” by forcing an AI prompting class as a prerequisite for most majors. These groups represent a lot of people and a lot of money. It doesn’t have to work. It just has to sell and become entrenched enough. And by all metrics that is what is happening. A self fulfilling prophecy, no different than your org buying redundant enterprise software from all the major vendors today.

isoprophlex 11mo ago
> broccoli headed kids now that there's a prime quality rare insult anyway i totally agree with your reasoning. one might as well ask "why is MS Teams so bad? it's bloated, slow, buggy, nasty to use from a UX pov... yet it's everywhere" this shitware -- ms teams, llm slopguns, whatever -- never had to work, they just have to sell.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

macNchz 11mo ago

There are at least a few stories from the 90s where companies that readily could have invested in “getting online” instead decided that it would only harm their existing business. The hype at the time was extraordinary to be sure, but after the dust settled the internet did change the shape of the world. Nobody can really know what things will look like in 10 years, but if you have the capital to deploy and any conviction at all that this might be a sea-change moment, it seems foolish to not pursue it.

boxerab 11mo ago
Pascal's Wager for tech.
- krige 11mo ago
  More like it's edgy cousin, the basilisk.
Frieren 11mo ago
> Nobody can really know what things will look like in 10 years, 100% true. Do not invest trillions on such an uncertainty in the long term is always a bad investment. > but if you have the capital to deploy and any conviction at all that this might be a sea-change moment, it seems foolish to not pursue it. Gamblers argument: "But what if this is the winning ticket?"
- sampullman 11mo ago
  Then aren't most forms of investment based on a "gambler's argument"? A risky investment is obviously akin to gambling, but to get things built and make a profit you have no other choice.
  - amelius 11mo ago
    > Then aren't most forms of investment based on a "gambler's argument"? Are you now equating an investor with some guy in a casino? Sorry, but that seems like a stretch.

shalmanese 11mo ago

What evidence do you have that it's driving consumers away from the product? The people who bother to say anything on the internet are the extreme dedicated minority and are often not representative of a silent majority. Unless you have access to analytics, you can't make this inference.

frm88 11mo ago
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/ https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans... That's only one article and with only a small focus: Americans only. U.S. adults are generally pessimistic about AI’s effect on people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships: 53% say AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively, compared with 16% who say it will improve this.... Regarding your skepticism about the loss of trust: https://publicpolicy.cornell.edu/masters-blog/what-americans-really-think-about-ai-algorithms-public-confidence-and-transparency-in-government/ https://publicpolicy.cornell.edu/masters-blog/what-americans... One of the most consistent themes in the research is fear of misinformation. In an era where AI-generated content can be nearly indistinguishable from authentic material, the potential for deception is enormous, and people know it. A full 76% of Americans say they are concerned about AI tools producing false or misleading information.
- NeutralCrane 11mo ago
  That doesn’t say anything about pushing people away from using products with AI though. People are enormously negative about the effects of social media, and yet social media use is incredibly pervasive and sticky.
  - frm88 11mo ago
    I thought that the loss of trust would be self-explanatory in that regard? You don't buy stuff you don't trust, yes? Anyways: https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-products-ai https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-pro... Researchers have found that including the words “artificial intelligence” in product marketing is a major turn-off for consumers, suggesting a growing backlash and disillusionment with the tech — and that startups trying to cram “AI” into their product are actually making a grave error.

raincole 11mo ago

I don't know which product you're even talking about. If you mean AI Overview, you really need to cite the source of this claim: > seeing that it drives consumers away from your product Because every single source I can find claims that Google search grew in 2024[0]. HN is not a good focus group for a product that targets billions of people. [0]: For example https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-growth-39040.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-growth-39040.html but feel free to provide a more credible source that claims the opposite.

devsda 11mo ago
One can also interpret the growth as a failure from product p.o.v though it drives views. With AI summaries being hit or miss, we may say users now need to do 20% more searches to find what they are looking for. Numbers aren't always a good proxy for customer satisfaction.
- hgomersall 11mo ago
  This was literally their policy. Make the searches worse so people search more. https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/ https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/
  - DeathArrow 11mo ago
    That's pure genius. Make cars break faster so you can sell more cars.

tammer 11mo ago

While you & I may find shoehorning LLMs into every nook & cranny distasteful, I worry Marl may think differently https://open.substack.com/pub/nothinghuman/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user https://open.substack.com/pub/nothinghuman/p/the-tyranny-of-...

elif 11mo ago

People are scared of change which threatens their occupation, hobbies, and sense of human purpose. Even if that change is wildly profitable for megacorps in the long run.

tdeck 11mo ago

> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Hey now, Google Plus was more than a decade ago. I didn't like it either, but maybe it's time to move on? I think they learned their lesson.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
philipallstar 11mo ago
Stadia was pretty recent, though.
- tdeck 11mo ago
  Did Stadia do anything that adversely affected already successful products? I thought it had limited collateral damage.

moi2388 11mo ago

What I think: - get customers used to using AI by “gently” cough nudging them towards this in all products. - get experience and data for your LLMs and AI dev teams regarding what works and what doesn’t - Bet on AI becoming good enough that people will use this as their entry to the Web, Media and software - become the largest player of these AI apps, so that you can inject ads again

Blamklmo 11mo ago
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brainwad 11mo ago

Eastman Kodak tried your implied proposed strategy, of ignoring technological developments that undermine their core product. It didn't go so well. Naturally technology companies have learned from this and other past mistakes.

DeathArrow 11mo ago
Kodak developed a prototype digital camera in 1975. In 1990 they started selling digital cameras. They manufactured their own sensors. How did they ignore technological advancements?
- Iulioh 11mo ago
  Having the shinyest toys is useless if you don't play with them. They had the tech but didn't see the danger in it, they belived that the lower quality digital camera would fail and investing in them would mean exploring a new market and they choose the safe corporate move, buisness as usual. Turns out that low quality but way more pratical and cheaper on the long run really sells
  - lizknope 11mo ago
    https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/908575-one-of-job-s-business-rules-was-to-never-be-afraid https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/908575-one-of-job-s-busines... “One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.” Kodak did sell digital cameras but they were so scared of protecting their film business I don't think they went all in on digital and let the other camera companies take over.
pfannkuchen 11mo ago
I’m not sure this is the whole story. Kodak operated in a region that was a manufacturing and technology hub until the mid 1900s. The region started to decline significantly in the 1960s. By the 1990s it was basically a ruins compared to the 1950s. So by the time Kodak made this strategic mistake, I imagine they already would have had a hard time recruiting talent into that obviously dying region for a decade or so, and many people who were there already were actively leaving the region by that time. I suspect that in the counterfactual where the region stayed as it was in the 1950s in terms of economic prosperity, Kodak probably could have successfully played catch up once it was clear where the game was going. So yes they made a strategic mistake, but they did so while simultaneously “brain drain” bleeding out due to other unrelated factors.

terminalshort 11mo ago

> seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust Where is your evidence for this part of your claim?

satvikpendem 11mo ago

> If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will. - Steve Jobs

marcosdumay 11mo ago
Eh... That's only worth anything if the new version of "you" is better than the original. I'm certain Jobs thought there's no need to point that detail, because nobody still living¹ would be dumb enough not to understand it implicitly. Too bad that we have evidence otherwise. 1 - At the worst case, selection bias should make it true.
- satvikpendem 11mo ago
  I'm not really sure what you're saying. He was talking specifically about the iPhone vs the iPod, and anyway, people buy inferior products all the time in tech history so there's no guarantee a better product would succeed anyway.
  - marcosdumay 11mo ago
    It's at least something people prefer. There's no way he even thought people would use that rationale for taking products people like (or dislike less) out of the market to cannibalize the market by force with something people don't like (or dislike more).
    - satvikpendem 11mo ago
      Good thing no one is talking about that sort of thing then. In the context of Google, either they implement LLMs themselves or another company will come and do so in order to cannibalize Google.