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I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of t

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

echelon 3mo ago
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- qsera 3mo ago
  The problem is that many people recognize it for what it is (not real AI), and they are against society paying large cost for its advancement AS IF it is true AI or a path to it.
- vitally3643 3mo ago
  The explicit and overt messaging from AI companies in the West is directly and loudly claiming their goal is to put people out of work. In a society where we've normalized "wage slave or death by starvation", yeah, you're gonna get backlash.
  - rubyfan 3mo ago
    I think you hit the nail on the head. In a winner take most society why would you expect the masses to embrace a technology that makes them losers?
    - site-packages1 3mo ago
      Particularly when there is no plan for all the displaced folks who no longer have jobs. Essentially the brilliant plan seems to be to fire humans working their jobs and getting paid, replace them with "AI", give savings to the CEO or billionaire class, let the jobless people starve or something. Like, you don't need an AI Assistant to tell you that this plan will create backlash.
  - parineum 3mo ago
    Your post implies that these things don't apply outside of the west but I don't see how they don't equally apply everywhere. Also, is it abnormal that if you don't do work you can't eat? That seems like a pretty fundamental truth of life on earth.
    - cassianoleal 3mo ago
      Working to eat and improve one's own livelihood is great. The problem with our model is that most of the output of my work doesn't go to those things - it goes to some rich dude who's gonna keep shoving ads to my face and burning the planet I live in.
      - parineum 3mo ago
        most of it?
  - philipallstar 3mo ago
    > In a society where we've normalized "wage slave or death by starvation" Not just a society - the whole world is like that by default.
- throw10101010 3mo ago
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- walt_grata 3mo ago
  Got any sources for those claims that show how broadly adopted ai is in those countries? I lookes at japan and china and could find a few articles, the anime one cites a single anime made with ai and nothing about its reception and similar results for china
  - dngray 3mo ago
    I know there's a lot of blog articles with blogspam ai slop with indian sounding names, so that's anecdotal but i have noticed that in tech.
- dngray 3mo ago
  A lot of those developing nations use it specifically to produce useless slop. Blog spam from India is also very common. I do use AI myself and don't believe its worthless, but I believe its only useful when you ask it fairly specific questions, with data it can consume publicly like "whats the rules for XYZ in this standard and if i do this problem like this in this way would that comply with those rules?" Type of thing. I've also found it useful for programming (but often does miss things or do things a long-handed way) you have to be very careful about the results and not simply accept it because it appears to work, so it still requires a human to have a brain. I'm not at all surprised that consumers dislike AI in this way because of the way its used, eg to replace help desk support, and create further distance between consumers and the companies they do business with. That's generally 100% how those companies use it because that is how AI companies have marketed it to executives. Only now are we seeing posts from those people saying "waahh tokens cost too much how long till we can build our own AI". Which is another point in itself business workflows should be resilient and not heavily dependent on the cost of openai or anthropic tokens to be competitive. If these two companies can simply turn up the money knob and make your business have a huge risk then that's bad. Also 100% we need to have sovereignty. We cannot depend on a single country to provide AI infrastructure. They can just shut it off whenever they feel like it. Maybe this week it's Fable/Mythos, and next week it's an entire country because Donald is unhappy and wouldn't "make a deal" on some thing he wants.
- breezybottom 3mo ago
  Most of the media is owned by tech billionaires, the Murdochs and other Trump allies, so that's an odd conspiracy theory.
  - sigbottle 3mo ago
    It's crazy how they're the ones with all the power and control at this point and they're still playing victim.
  - deleted 3mo ago
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- jmyeet 3mo ago
  > The media is actively instilling hate for AI. > Data centers are evil. Water is being destroyed. Eight whole rivers are drained to make a cat jpeg. > Rich people are stealing all the jobs. That would be a rare occurrence of the media doing its job because literally all of those things are true. One difference between China and the US is that China won't allow data centers to jack up electricity prices, make things more expensive, be an environmental nightmare or create an unemployment crisis. None of those guardrails exist the US and honestly most Western "democracies". Maybe there wouldn't be this reaction if we didn't have an affordability crisis and our government wasn't just 5 companies in a trench coat doing its best to do the largest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a different attitude to AI. I read a thing awhile ago that companies are increasingly resentful of having to go through you to get your money and I think about that often because it feels like the most accurate description of living in 2026.
  - jazzypants 3mo ago
    The only one that's not entirely true is the water usage concern. The vast amount of water usage is non-consumptive, and you can even use reclaimed wastewater. To be clear, I'm on your side-- I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
    - tennfown 3mo ago
      > I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation. Your enemies aren’t afraid to spout misinformation, and they’re winning.
      - jazzypants 3mo ago
        I think we're doing just fine considering how they have all the resources and every possible advantage, but we're still seeing headlines like this.
    - deleted 3mo ago
- shafyy 3mo ago
  And rightly so
- saintfire 3mo ago
  Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who picks up random tools, unrelated to AI, because AI is advertised. Usually when I see people see a pop-off for Try our AI assistant I hear "Fuck off" or "leave me alone" while they close it. It's like everything has a modern Clippy. Personally I do see it as a VC signal, as if they gave up on making a good tool and started working on slopifying it. 60% is lower than I imagined, tbh. Most people aren't doing agentic workflows and AI is likely not a selling point.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- jazzypants 3mo ago
  You think this is the media's fault? The media didn't force Altman and Amodei to tell everyone they were about to lose their jobs. The media didn't force Microsoft and Google to push half-cocked AI features into all of their products. The media didn't concoct secretive deals with municipalities so that residents didn't know data centers were being built in their neighborhoods until it was too late. The AI industry has caused every single issue that it faces. It's absurd that you can't see this. "The media" barely even means anything anymore as the current landscape is so fractured. Who are you even talking about? Ed Zitron?
- stetrain 3mo ago
  > Rich people are stealing all the jobs. The AI promoters are themselves saying these things because it is the positive case for their business, that other businesses can pay them for AI services that are cheaper and better than keeping existing jobs. > Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement. > “Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sam-altman-congress-ai-jobs https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sa...
  - philipallstar 3mo ago
    You should've seen what the internal combustion engine did to the horse and cart industry.
    - apical_dendrite 3mo ago
      And I'm sure the 50 year-old guy with the nice job at the stables just loved hearing Henry Ford talk about how nobody was going to own horses anymore. This is an article about consumer sentiment. Consumers care much more about their own financial security than about Sam Altman's vision of a glorious future.
      - philipallstar 3mo ago
        I'm sure. But if he were American he'd rather than car industry started in America than in China, though. And he could afford a car himself and improve his own lifestyle.
    - stetrain 3mo ago
      Sure, so the economic anxiety from people with careers in the horse and cart industry was fully justified.
rubyfan 3mo ago
That’s why it’s so perplexing as a consumer when AI gets pushed so hard as if it’s a feature. Consumers don’t care what code your devs use, what cloud platform you deploy on, so why should they care about AI in your product? AI is not a feature; features are features tell me about those.
- JeremyNT 3mo ago
  I believe the issue here is that, simply due to how these products came to market, "AI" is extremely vague, and slapping "AI" on every single thing makes it almost a negative signal for quality. For most users "AI" probably just means "chatbot" - and that's not compelling, because they can already access a chatbot, why would they want one in every product they use? The more advanced features / workflows that LLMs can enable are kind of opaque if your points of reference are the ChatGPT web interface and summaries of search results on google.com - one reason that "agent" or "harness" have become useful jargon is that it distinguishes the tool we use and what it can do from the tech that backs it.
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    AI in various forms are used all over, but do your point - users don't know it is AI. They also don't care. They care what AI does, and that is the feature that gets advertised, that AI does it they don't care. They are mostly not chatting with the machines and devices that have AI, they are pushing a button and letting the machine work for them while they sit back and relax (or more often go on to do other things)
    - AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
      Then maybe we could say that if it's visibly AI, then they've failed. We don't notice the well-done AI, just the badly done ones that hinder the user rather than helping. And therefore probably in users' minds, when you say "AI", they think of all the badly done ones, not the good ones, because they didn't notice the good ones as AI. So when you advertise it as AI, that's a negative.
    - 3mo ago
dofm 3mo ago
It’s CEOs who want this because they have seen demos of AI, played with it themselves and have become immediately convinced that if they can make it do something amazing in two minutes, it must be a super weapon in the hands of the developers. So they go all pointy-haired boss about insisting it gets shoehorned into everything. Many CEOs, actually including tech CEOs, are in the foothills of the Dunning Kruger journey on much of the operations of their own businesses. They just don’t know what they don’t know, yet.
torben-friis 3mo ago
>while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour. I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many. What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!" You might as well market it as "created by child labor".
- afavour 3mo ago
  I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists. But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.
  - red-iron-pine 3mo ago
    spotify still pays artists. it's just a shitty deal. most big ai will never compensate anyone
    - happymellon 3mo ago
      Is it really much different to how much artists got from radio? Most artists never got radio money because it went into a label slush fund and was spent retaining the tent pole artists.
      - jasonlotito 3mo ago
        The big difference was radio wasn't on-demand. You couldn't just listen to a complete album. If you wanted to listen to your favorite artist, you couldn't do that on the radio without listening to a lot of other stuff.
        happymellon 3mo ago
        Most artists didn't make money from album sales. They received some money up front in a contract to record the album, and the label make the money from sales. There is a reason the bands toured and sold teeshirts.
ck2 3mo ago
Is anyone old enough to remember the switch from customer call centers having a human quickly answer to long long annoying phone menus because that friction, getting the customer to do some work or busy distraction, somehow saved costs for the company? No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human) "AI" to me means the exact same thing company wants to cut costs by eliminating human labor to increase profits it means things are going to be wildly inconvenient with limited options it ALWAYS means it's going to be worse Hide your "AI", no-one is impressed or excited about it, quite the opposite If it's a website, if I can't block your "AI" via javascript, I'll do it via CSS
- ilaksh 3mo ago
  LLMs are replacing a lot of the inflexible phone menus, and in leading implementations, can do all of the things a human could do. Or at least, make a recommendation for things it can't do that just require a human to hit an accept button.
  - slumberlust 3mo ago
    I haven't experienced any chatbot or telebot that can do anything for me. The whole reason I'm calling is that the self service wasn't successful.
  - butlike 3mo ago
    Yell "HELP HELP" into the chatbot and see if it calls 911 for you.
- marcosdumay 3mo ago
  > No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human) They beat waiting for somebody to answer the phone just to tell you they are sending the call to somebody else and you'll have to explain everything again. The sequences where you authenticate on the menu and no person is allowed to ask for authentication information makes sense too. I don't think anybody actually like it, but it is better than the alternative. Nobody likes badly designed menus.
mikeocool 3mo ago
I dunno, I think in the past year “AI” has gone from meaningless buzzword to having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population. “That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”
- kranke155 3mo ago
  All people I know hear when they hear AI is - they are automating art, there are layoffs incoming, they want to build a data centre next to me that will make my electricity costs go up, they are automating the consumer help call center. The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.
  - red-iron-pine 3mo ago
    who, to put a finer point on it, presumably stand to benefit from the AI
  - Sharlin 3mo ago
    Honestly, what are the positive viewpoints of generative AI in the end? Are there others major ones than the following? * My vibe coding machine goes brrrrt and that's all I care about * My college essay cheating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about * My custom waifu/porn-generating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about * The concept of AI is drawing all the investor money and that's all I care about The common factor being self-centeredness and/or being part of a small ingroup that benefits, possibly at the expense of others.
    - tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
      The funny thing is most of the evangelists aren’t really in the in group and will be just as exposed to the results as the rest of us.
    - stetrain 3mo ago
      The positive viewpoint is basically like the Industrial Revolution or the post-WWII consumer/convenience boom. If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth. It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure. Of course the reality for the actual workers on the line is that their job and industry may be disrupted and the overall benefits of that economic growth may not reach them during their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was followed by a century of major and sometimes violent disputes over the relationship between corporations and labor and the rights of workers. The post-WWII promises of convenience and leisure were replaced by the reality of the baseline adjusting and households needing to work the same or even more combined hours to make ends meet. Even if the optimistic levels of economic growth occur, the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed.
cyanydeez 3mo ago
the consumers will get what the oligarchs want
csomar 3mo ago
For me personally, it’s because “AI-powered” products are the most unreliable, buggy and annoying.
ryukoposting 3mo ago
At best it's seen as an out-of-touch techie buzzword. More commonly it's associated with useless chatbots and ugly pictures. At worst it's associated with destruction of the natural environment, corruption, and small towns hollowed out by horrible living conditions imposed upon them by west coast capitalists.
data-ottawa 3mo ago
It’s so hard to find usable products when everything is “XYZ for the Agentic era” Okay… what does that mean?
- throwaway0123_5 3mo ago
  The funniest one I've noticed lately is a bunch of Capital One ads saying "We built a multi-agentic system for finding a car to buy!" I'm not saying I 100% wouldn't use AI to help me in product searches, but isn't one of the main selling points of AI that it is general-purpose? Why can't I just boot up ChatGPT and ask it what cars have XYZ things I need? Certainly being informed that Capital One's system is "multi-agentic" doesn't tell me much about what is being offered.
bko 3mo ago
AI is the fastest growing consumer product in history. It argues AI is a turn-off because of a survey (methodology not disclosed) and is done by a company that's trying to sell you something. Sorry but I'm skeptical.
- butlike 3mo ago
  AI is not a product, though
Aurornis 3mo ago
When I talk to people, from school students to middle aged employees, the common story is that they appreciate what AI can do for them when they choose to use it. They are tired of hearing AI as a buzzword and having it shoehorned into every app and service they use. Most AI features have been rushed to market to check a box to say a company has an AI strategy, but they don’t work well. They’re just changing a familiar UI and popping up annoying notices. Everyone also really doesn’t like consuming other people’s AI produced content. They associate it with slop on social media, fake headlines that tricked them, and low quality work their coworkers dump on them to waste their time. Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office. But most everyone thinks their own AI output is the exception: They like being able to type a couple sentences into ChatGPT and have it tell them something or produce some output that would have taken more time if they did it manually.
- red-iron-pine 3mo ago
  aye. I work with AI every day in an IT role and at this point I am painfully aware of its strengths and limitations. And it does have strengths. But those strengths come with serious limitations, and huge society-level trade-offs. Annihilating the power grid in exchange for poorly formatted Powerpoint slides is not really a worthwhile exchange. For most other products, like my cellphone, AI has no benefit except to further degrade my privacy, experience, environement, and battery life. Ditto for many other products with shoehorned AI.
  - goalieca 3mo ago
    Apple is obsoleting the 8 series and earlier of watches because they can't deliver on the "AI" features that product so wants to push. This is really sad.
- queenkjuul 3mo ago
  > Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office. Sadly for me this was my engineering manager
j45 3mo ago
Also how poorly the understanding of AI has been implemented. There are real dated gaps that have formed thanks to the non-tech hype people.
jmyeet 3mo ago
xAI built an unpermitted power plant in a residential area to power Grok [1]. No planning permission, no public comment, no environmental study, etc. Even worse, the gas turbines don't comply with Federal standards for air pollutants because they're "mobile". These kinds of gas turbines have exploded in demand by the way. What's the government doing about this? They're stripping the EPA os the power to regulate pollution [2] and suing in support of xAI's gas turbines [3]. Anger about AI is in part a reflection of anger about declining material conditions where corporations and the ultra-wealthy can increasingly stomp over regular cities with impunity while getting ever-richer. The state's response is going to get ever-more violent and extreme. Over-charging in federal courts, over-policing and violence against peaceful protestors as the law enforcement arm of the government increasingly takes off the mask regarding being the security apparatus for the protection of capital. Automation (including AI) could be a good thing for society as people would have to work less and we could automate away more dangerous, menial and low-paid work, improving the material conditions for everyone. We don't live in that world. [1]: https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-to-power-its-data-center/ https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t... [2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/11/nx-s1-5678273/trump-epa-climate-change-endangerment https://www.npr.org/2026/02/11/nx-s1-5678273/trump-epa-clima... [3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-helps-xai-fight-pollution-lawsuit-says-military-needs-grok-for-war/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-help...
spcebar 3mo ago
Exactly. It's less important if customers are turned off by it. It's not signaling for consumers, it's signaling for the market.
_the_inflator 3mo ago
I am annoyed by 90% of the AI content. Even good AI content has always two disadvantages, which are so huge, that I consider them flaws: - bloat - selliness The peak cringe is the mixture of both: convolutes of texts massing buzzwords, links and sales tactics. This feel like a rip off and a huge time waste. And lets not talk about LinkedIn: a dumpster for AI generated content, the companies should be ashamed of. Do they actually read what they produce? No, not really. It is pure insolence and puts them in a bad spot, at least in my book.
jm4 3mo ago
I think there’s some truth to that. The reality is most companies are implementing AI badly. It’s not actually solving anything and feels more like a checkbox on a feature matrix. Bolt on a chatbot and the job’s done. Here’s a perfect example. Square recently rolled out “managerbot”. I was like “oh, cool” because I actually wanted something like that. I asked it a few questions about the data in my system, most of which it couldn’t answer. On top of that, it was as slow as molasses. I could pull the report and get the information myself faster than that bot could do anything. Square isn’t the only one. Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, etc. They are all guilty of it. Personally, I like using AI tools, but I’m experiencing the marketing fatigue too. Developers are putting it into everything, doing it badly and then pitching it as a central feature. I guess it’s the natural cycle of things though. We are somewhere around the peak hype -> disillusionment part of the cycle.
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
  AI tech is neutral - some good, some bad, and the bad is oversold compared to other industries. (Most people have no idea how incredibly ecologically destructive paper + print are.) But the tech was captured and adopted by marketing-think and corporate opportunism. And that's the real problem. Both were toxic plagues before AI. And as an amplification technology, AI has enabled them to unprecedented levels of fail.
randusername 3mo ago
I think you're understating it. It's blatant marketing to investors, not users. How anyone can still have doubts about "you are the product now, not the customer" is beyond me. Everyday folk have never cared much about any specific technology, only the experience, and the overwhelming majority of AI retrofits are lazily conceived from a user experience standpoint.
alpineman 3mo ago
Like every YC company solving problems experienced by, and selling to, other YC companies
safety1st 3mo ago
We launched an AI feature and there was immediate blowback in the form of negative feedback. We then rebranded it as "Advanced Search," kept the sparkle icon and everything, literally just a find-and-replace of instances of "AI" with "Advanced," pretty much. The negative feedback stopped. The very next day someone wrote in and said it was an incredible feature. Branding is wild. The modern media environment is wild. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong to hate on AI. But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain, even if the discussion in question has zero bearing on their job. There's polling on this and job security is far and away the populace's biggest concern related to AI.
- harimau777 3mo ago
  That sounds a lot like trying to deceive your users.
- dominotw 3mo ago
  every shitty feature has someone "writing in to tell you how "incredible" it is. Its not a proof that you think it is. dont let that fool you into thinking "users were too stupid to undestand our awesome feature so we had to dumb it down for them"
- devsda 3mo ago
  Is it possible that the team collecting the feedback is reporting specific feedback for 'AI' terminology ? Renaming customer service team to customer success team and claiming customer service issues reduced is like corporate/leadership strategy 101.
- wavemode 3mo ago
  > But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain I think even this view is missing the point. My opinion is that most people are overcomplicating this whole issue. When people react negatively to the term "AI", it's simply because the vast majority of features branded "AI" in the vast majority of products, are pure garbage. Searching for some deeper cultural or psychological reason is a waste of time - let's just stop pushing garbage AI products, then maybe someday people's perception of the term will change. Until then, just leave that word out of the marketing material. Nobody really cares how the product is implemented, just focus on what it does.
mlsu 3mo ago
This should be regarded as a failure of the markets. This anti consumer crap, that people demonstrably hate, worked! It worked to increase share price. We should all see that as a a fundamental failure of the market to transmit information about what brings the consumer value. Instead, it has been rewarded to the tune of trillions of dollars, a huge segment of society's resources. There is a sense among level-headed people that the market is irrational "right now," but it's been years of this shit. When do we call a spade a spade?
biophysboy 3mo ago
Yes exactly. It’s like advertising a car by saying “it uses gasoline!” Obviously gas helps the car go, but the user of the car just wants to go places cheaply and reliably
easterncalculus 3mo ago
In addition to the wonders of the physical world, national parks, lakefront properties, skiing locations becoming owned by and run for the rich, advertising is moving further from the consumer to investors, their true market. They don't need the poors anymore.
xiphias2 3mo ago
What's interesting is that all big LLM providers figured out that the revenue comes from coding as it can be trained with RL rewards. It means that most people will never understand how fast the landscape is moving: non-coding and non-homework use cases didn't change that much since last year.
warecho 3mo ago
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echelon 3mo ago

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qsera 3mo ago
The problem is that many people recognize it for what it is (not real AI), and they are against society paying large cost for its advancement AS IF it is true AI or a path to it.
vitally3643 3mo ago
The explicit and overt messaging from AI companies in the West is directly and loudly claiming their goal is to put people out of work. In a society where we've normalized "wage slave or death by starvation", yeah, you're gonna get backlash.
- rubyfan 3mo ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head. In a winner take most society why would you expect the masses to embrace a technology that makes them losers?
  - site-packages1 3mo ago
    Particularly when there is no plan for all the displaced folks who no longer have jobs. Essentially the brilliant plan seems to be to fire humans working their jobs and getting paid, replace them with "AI", give savings to the CEO or billionaire class, let the jobless people starve or something. Like, you don't need an AI Assistant to tell you that this plan will create backlash.
- parineum 3mo ago
  Your post implies that these things don't apply outside of the west but I don't see how they don't equally apply everywhere. Also, is it abnormal that if you don't do work you can't eat? That seems like a pretty fundamental truth of life on earth.
  - cassianoleal 3mo ago
    Working to eat and improve one's own livelihood is great. The problem with our model is that most of the output of my work doesn't go to those things - it goes to some rich dude who's gonna keep shoving ads to my face and burning the planet I live in.
    - parineum 3mo ago
      most of it?
- philipallstar 3mo ago
  > In a society where we've normalized "wage slave or death by starvation" Not just a society - the whole world is like that by default.
throw10101010 3mo ago
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walt_grata 3mo ago
Got any sources for those claims that show how broadly adopted ai is in those countries? I lookes at japan and china and could find a few articles, the anime one cites a single anime made with ai and nothing about its reception and similar results for china
- dngray 3mo ago
  I know there's a lot of blog articles with blogspam ai slop with indian sounding names, so that's anecdotal but i have noticed that in tech.
dngray 3mo ago
A lot of those developing nations use it specifically to produce useless slop. Blog spam from India is also very common. I do use AI myself and don't believe its worthless, but I believe its only useful when you ask it fairly specific questions, with data it can consume publicly like "whats the rules for XYZ in this standard and if i do this problem like this in this way would that comply with those rules?" Type of thing. I've also found it useful for programming (but often does miss things or do things a long-handed way) you have to be very careful about the results and not simply accept it because it appears to work, so it still requires a human to have a brain. I'm not at all surprised that consumers dislike AI in this way because of the way its used, eg to replace help desk support, and create further distance between consumers and the companies they do business with. That's generally 100% how those companies use it because that is how AI companies have marketed it to executives. Only now are we seeing posts from those people saying "waahh tokens cost too much how long till we can build our own AI". Which is another point in itself business workflows should be resilient and not heavily dependent on the cost of openai or anthropic tokens to be competitive. If these two companies can simply turn up the money knob and make your business have a huge risk then that's bad. Also 100% we need to have sovereignty. We cannot depend on a single country to provide AI infrastructure. They can just shut it off whenever they feel like it. Maybe this week it's Fable/Mythos, and next week it's an entire country because Donald is unhappy and wouldn't "make a deal" on some thing he wants.
breezybottom 3mo ago
Most of the media is owned by tech billionaires, the Murdochs and other Trump allies, so that's an odd conspiracy theory.
- sigbottle 3mo ago
  It's crazy how they're the ones with all the power and control at this point and they're still playing victim.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
jmyeet 3mo ago
> The media is actively instilling hate for AI. > Data centers are evil. Water is being destroyed. Eight whole rivers are drained to make a cat jpeg. > Rich people are stealing all the jobs. That would be a rare occurrence of the media doing its job because literally all of those things are true. One difference between China and the US is that China won't allow data centers to jack up electricity prices, make things more expensive, be an environmental nightmare or create an unemployment crisis. None of those guardrails exist the US and honestly most Western "democracies". Maybe there wouldn't be this reaction if we didn't have an affordability crisis and our government wasn't just 5 companies in a trench coat doing its best to do the largest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a different attitude to AI. I read a thing awhile ago that companies are increasingly resentful of having to go through you to get your money and I think about that often because it feels like the most accurate description of living in 2026.
- jazzypants 3mo ago
  The only one that's not entirely true is the water usage concern. The vast amount of water usage is non-consumptive, and you can even use reclaimed wastewater. To be clear, I'm on your side-- I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
  - tennfown 3mo ago
    > I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation. Your enemies aren’t afraid to spout misinformation, and they’re winning.
    - jazzypants 3mo ago
      I think we're doing just fine considering how they have all the resources and every possible advantage, but we're still seeing headlines like this.
  - deleted 3mo ago
shafyy 3mo ago
And rightly so
saintfire 3mo ago
Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who picks up random tools, unrelated to AI, because AI is advertised. Usually when I see people see a pop-off for Try our AI assistant I hear "Fuck off" or "leave me alone" while they close it. It's like everything has a modern Clippy. Personally I do see it as a VC signal, as if they gave up on making a good tool and started working on slopifying it. 60% is lower than I imagined, tbh. Most people aren't doing agentic workflows and AI is likely not a selling point.
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jazzypants 3mo ago
You think this is the media's fault? The media didn't force Altman and Amodei to tell everyone they were about to lose their jobs. The media didn't force Microsoft and Google to push half-cocked AI features into all of their products. The media didn't concoct secretive deals with municipalities so that residents didn't know data centers were being built in their neighborhoods until it was too late. The AI industry has caused every single issue that it faces. It's absurd that you can't see this. "The media" barely even means anything anymore as the current landscape is so fractured. Who are you even talking about? Ed Zitron?
stetrain 3mo ago
> Rich people are stealing all the jobs. The AI promoters are themselves saying these things because it is the positive case for their business, that other businesses can pay them for AI services that are cheaper and better than keeping existing jobs. > Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement. > “Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sam-altman-congress-ai-jobs https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sa...
- philipallstar 3mo ago
  You should've seen what the internal combustion engine did to the horse and cart industry.
  - apical_dendrite 3mo ago
    And I'm sure the 50 year-old guy with the nice job at the stables just loved hearing Henry Ford talk about how nobody was going to own horses anymore. This is an article about consumer sentiment. Consumers care much more about their own financial security than about Sam Altman's vision of a glorious future.
    - philipallstar 3mo ago
      I'm sure. But if he were American he'd rather than car industry started in America than in China, though. And he could afford a car himself and improve his own lifestyle.
  - stetrain 3mo ago
    Sure, so the economic anxiety from people with careers in the horse and cart industry was fully justified.

rubyfan 3mo ago

That’s why it’s so perplexing as a consumer when AI gets pushed so hard as if it’s a feature. Consumers don’t care what code your devs use, what cloud platform you deploy on, so why should they care about AI in your product? AI is not a feature; features are features tell me about those.

JeremyNT 3mo ago
I believe the issue here is that, simply due to how these products came to market, "AI" is extremely vague, and slapping "AI" on every single thing makes it almost a negative signal for quality. For most users "AI" probably just means "chatbot" - and that's not compelling, because they can already access a chatbot, why would they want one in every product they use? The more advanced features / workflows that LLMs can enable are kind of opaque if your points of reference are the ChatGPT web interface and summaries of search results on google.com - one reason that "agent" or "harness" have become useful jargon is that it distinguishes the tool we use and what it can do from the tech that backs it.
- bluGill 3mo ago
  AI in various forms are used all over, but do your point - users don't know it is AI. They also don't care. They care what AI does, and that is the feature that gets advertised, that AI does it they don't care. They are mostly not chatting with the machines and devices that have AI, they are pushing a button and letting the machine work for them while they sit back and relax (or more often go on to do other things)
  - AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
    Then maybe we could say that if it's visibly AI, then they've failed. We don't notice the well-done AI, just the badly done ones that hinder the user rather than helping. And therefore probably in users' minds, when you say "AI", they think of all the badly done ones, not the good ones, because they didn't notice the good ones as AI. So when you advertise it as AI, that's a negative.
  - 3mo ago

dofm 3mo ago

It’s CEOs who want this because they have seen demos of AI, played with it themselves and have become immediately convinced that if they can make it do something amazing in two minutes, it must be a super weapon in the hands of the developers. So they go all pointy-haired boss about insisting it gets shoehorned into everything. Many CEOs, actually including tech CEOs, are in the foothills of the Dunning Kruger journey on much of the operations of their own businesses. They just don’t know what they don’t know, yet.

torben-friis 3mo ago

>while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour. I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many. What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!" You might as well market it as "created by child labor".

afavour 3mo ago
I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists. But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.
- red-iron-pine 3mo ago
  spotify still pays artists. it's just a shitty deal. most big ai will never compensate anyone
  - happymellon 3mo ago
    Is it really much different to how much artists got from radio? Most artists never got radio money because it went into a label slush fund and was spent retaining the tent pole artists.
    - jasonlotito 3mo ago
      The big difference was radio wasn't on-demand. You couldn't just listen to a complete album. If you wanted to listen to your favorite artist, you couldn't do that on the radio without listening to a lot of other stuff.
      - happymellon 3mo ago
        Most artists didn't make money from album sales. They received some money up front in a contract to record the album, and the label make the money from sales. There is a reason the bands toured and sold teeshirts.

ck2 3mo ago

Is anyone old enough to remember the switch from customer call centers having a human quickly answer to long long annoying phone menus because that friction, getting the customer to do some work or busy distraction, somehow saved costs for the company? No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human) "AI" to me means the exact same thing company wants to cut costs by eliminating human labor to increase profits it means things are going to be wildly inconvenient with limited options it ALWAYS means it's going to be worse Hide your "AI", no-one is impressed or excited about it, quite the opposite If it's a website, if I can't block your "AI" via javascript, I'll do it via CSS

ilaksh 3mo ago
LLMs are replacing a lot of the inflexible phone menus, and in leading implementations, can do all of the things a human could do. Or at least, make a recommendation for things it can't do that just require a human to hit an accept button.
- slumberlust 3mo ago
  I haven't experienced any chatbot or telebot that can do anything for me. The whole reason I'm calling is that the self service wasn't successful.
- butlike 3mo ago
  Yell "HELP HELP" into the chatbot and see if it calls 911 for you.
marcosdumay 3mo ago
> No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human) They beat waiting for somebody to answer the phone just to tell you they are sending the call to somebody else and you'll have to explain everything again. The sequences where you authenticate on the menu and no person is allowed to ask for authentication information makes sense too. I don't think anybody actually like it, but it is better than the alternative. Nobody likes badly designed menus.

mikeocool 3mo ago

I dunno, I think in the past year “AI” has gone from meaningless buzzword to having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population. “That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”

kranke155 3mo ago
All people I know hear when they hear AI is - they are automating art, there are layoffs incoming, they want to build a data centre next to me that will make my electricity costs go up, they are automating the consumer help call center. The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.
- red-iron-pine 3mo ago
  who, to put a finer point on it, presumably stand to benefit from the AI
- Sharlin 3mo ago
  Honestly, what are the positive viewpoints of generative AI in the end? Are there others major ones than the following? * My vibe coding machine goes brrrrt and that's all I care about * My college essay cheating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about * My custom waifu/porn-generating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about * The concept of AI is drawing all the investor money and that's all I care about The common factor being self-centeredness and/or being part of a small ingroup that benefits, possibly at the expense of others.
  - tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
    The funny thing is most of the evangelists aren’t really in the in group and will be just as exposed to the results as the rest of us.
  - stetrain 3mo ago
    The positive viewpoint is basically like the Industrial Revolution or the post-WWII consumer/convenience boom. If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth. It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure. Of course the reality for the actual workers on the line is that their job and industry may be disrupted and the overall benefits of that economic growth may not reach them during their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was followed by a century of major and sometimes violent disputes over the relationship between corporations and labor and the rights of workers. The post-WWII promises of convenience and leisure were replaced by the reality of the baseline adjusting and households needing to work the same or even more combined hours to make ends meet. Even if the optimistic levels of economic growth occur, the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed.

cyanydeez 3mo ago

the consumers will get what the oligarchs want

csomar 3mo ago

For me personally, it’s because “AI-powered” products are the most unreliable, buggy and annoying.

ryukoposting 3mo ago

At best it's seen as an out-of-touch techie buzzword. More commonly it's associated with useless chatbots and ugly pictures. At worst it's associated with destruction of the natural environment, corruption, and small towns hollowed out by horrible living conditions imposed upon them by west coast capitalists.

data-ottawa 3mo ago

It’s so hard to find usable products when everything is “XYZ for the Agentic era” Okay… what does that mean?

throwaway0123_5 3mo ago
The funniest one I've noticed lately is a bunch of Capital One ads saying "We built a multi-agentic system for finding a car to buy!" I'm not saying I 100% wouldn't use AI to help me in product searches, but isn't one of the main selling points of AI that it is general-purpose? Why can't I just boot up ChatGPT and ask it what cars have XYZ things I need? Certainly being informed that Capital One's system is "multi-agentic" doesn't tell me much about what is being offered.

bko 3mo ago

AI is the fastest growing consumer product in history. It argues AI is a turn-off because of a survey (methodology not disclosed) and is done by a company that's trying to sell you something. Sorry but I'm skeptical.

butlike 3mo ago
AI is not a product, though

Aurornis 3mo ago

When I talk to people, from school students to middle aged employees, the common story is that they appreciate what AI can do for them when they choose to use it. They are tired of hearing AI as a buzzword and having it shoehorned into every app and service they use. Most AI features have been rushed to market to check a box to say a company has an AI strategy, but they don’t work well. They’re just changing a familiar UI and popping up annoying notices. Everyone also really doesn’t like consuming other people’s AI produced content. They associate it with slop on social media, fake headlines that tricked them, and low quality work their coworkers dump on them to waste their time. Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office. But most everyone thinks their own AI output is the exception: They like being able to type a couple sentences into ChatGPT and have it tell them something or produce some output that would have taken more time if they did it manually.

red-iron-pine 3mo ago
aye. I work with AI every day in an IT role and at this point I am painfully aware of its strengths and limitations. And it does have strengths. But those strengths come with serious limitations, and huge society-level trade-offs. Annihilating the power grid in exchange for poorly formatted Powerpoint slides is not really a worthwhile exchange. For most other products, like my cellphone, AI has no benefit except to further degrade my privacy, experience, environement, and battery life. Ditto for many other products with shoehorned AI.
- goalieca 3mo ago
  Apple is obsoleting the 8 series and earlier of watches because they can't deliver on the "AI" features that product so wants to push. This is really sad.
queenkjuul 3mo ago
> Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office. Sadly for me this was my engineering manager

j45 3mo ago

Also how poorly the understanding of AI has been implemented. There are real dated gaps that have formed thanks to the non-tech hype people.

jmyeet 3mo ago

xAI built an unpermitted power plant in a residential area to power Grok [1]. No planning permission, no public comment, no environmental study, etc. Even worse, the gas turbines don't comply with Federal standards for air pollutants because they're "mobile". These kinds of gas turbines have exploded in demand by the way. What's the government doing about this? They're stripping the EPA os the power to regulate pollution [2] and suing in support of xAI's gas turbines [3]. Anger about AI is in part a reflection of anger about declining material conditions where corporations and the ultra-wealthy can increasingly stomp over regular cities with impunity while getting ever-richer. The state's response is going to get ever-more violent and extreme. Over-charging in federal courts, over-policing and violence against peaceful protestors as the law enforcement arm of the government increasingly takes off the mask regarding being the security apparatus for the protection of capital. Automation (including AI) could be a good thing for society as people would have to work less and we could automate away more dangerous, menial and low-paid work, improving the material conditions for everyone. We don't live in that world. [1]: https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-to-power-its-data-center/ https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t... [2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/11/nx-s1-5678273/trump-epa-climate-change-endangerment https://www.npr.org/2026/02/11/nx-s1-5678273/trump-epa-clima... [3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-helps-xai-fight-pollution-lawsuit-says-military-needs-grok-for-war/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-help...

spcebar 3mo ago

Exactly. It's less important if customers are turned off by it. It's not signaling for consumers, it's signaling for the market.

_the_inflator 3mo ago

I am annoyed by 90% of the AI content. Even good AI content has always two disadvantages, which are so huge, that I consider them flaws: - bloat - selliness The peak cringe is the mixture of both: convolutes of texts massing buzzwords, links and sales tactics. This feel like a rip off and a huge time waste. And lets not talk about LinkedIn: a dumpster for AI generated content, the companies should be ashamed of. Do they actually read what they produce? No, not really. It is pure insolence and puts them in a bad spot, at least in my book.

jm4 3mo ago

I think there’s some truth to that. The reality is most companies are implementing AI badly. It’s not actually solving anything and feels more like a checkbox on a feature matrix. Bolt on a chatbot and the job’s done. Here’s a perfect example. Square recently rolled out “managerbot”. I was like “oh, cool” because I actually wanted something like that. I asked it a few questions about the data in my system, most of which it couldn’t answer. On top of that, it was as slow as molasses. I could pull the report and get the information myself faster than that bot could do anything. Square isn’t the only one. Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, etc. They are all guilty of it. Personally, I like using AI tools, but I’m experiencing the marketing fatigue too. Developers are putting it into everything, doing it badly and then pitching it as a central feature. I guess it’s the natural cycle of things though. We are somewhere around the peak hype -> disillusionment part of the cycle.

TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
AI tech is neutral - some good, some bad, and the bad is oversold compared to other industries. (Most people have no idea how incredibly ecologically destructive paper + print are.) But the tech was captured and adopted by marketing-think and corporate opportunism. And that's the real problem. Both were toxic plagues before AI. And as an amplification technology, AI has enabled them to unprecedented levels of fail.

randusername 3mo ago

I think you're understating it. It's blatant marketing to investors, not users. How anyone can still have doubts about "you are the product now, not the customer" is beyond me. Everyday folk have never cared much about any specific technology, only the experience, and the overwhelming majority of AI retrofits are lazily conceived from a user experience standpoint.

alpineman 3mo ago

Like every YC company solving problems experienced by, and selling to, other YC companies

safety1st 3mo ago

We launched an AI feature and there was immediate blowback in the form of negative feedback. We then rebranded it as "Advanced Search," kept the sparkle icon and everything, literally just a find-and-replace of instances of "AI" with "Advanced," pretty much. The negative feedback stopped. The very next day someone wrote in and said it was an incredible feature. Branding is wild. The modern media environment is wild. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong to hate on AI. But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain, even if the discussion in question has zero bearing on their job. There's polling on this and job security is far and away the populace's biggest concern related to AI.

harimau777 3mo ago
That sounds a lot like trying to deceive your users.
dominotw 3mo ago
every shitty feature has someone "writing in to tell you how "incredible" it is. Its not a proof that you think it is. dont let that fool you into thinking "users were too stupid to undestand our awesome feature so we had to dumb it down for them"
devsda 3mo ago
Is it possible that the team collecting the feedback is reporting specific feedback for 'AI' terminology ? Renaming customer service team to customer success team and claiming customer service issues reduced is like corporate/leadership strategy 101.
wavemode 3mo ago
> But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain I think even this view is missing the point. My opinion is that most people are overcomplicating this whole issue. When people react negatively to the term "AI", it's simply because the vast majority of features branded "AI" in the vast majority of products, are pure garbage. Searching for some deeper cultural or psychological reason is a waste of time - let's just stop pushing garbage AI products, then maybe someday people's perception of the term will change. Until then, just leave that word out of the marketing material. Nobody really cares how the product is implemented, just focus on what it does.

mlsu 3mo ago

This should be regarded as a failure of the markets. This anti consumer crap, that people demonstrably hate, worked! It worked to increase share price. We should all see that as a a fundamental failure of the market to transmit information about what brings the consumer value. Instead, it has been rewarded to the tune of trillions of dollars, a huge segment of society's resources. There is a sense among level-headed people that the market is irrational "right now," but it's been years of this shit. When do we call a spade a spade?

biophysboy 3mo ago

Yes exactly. It’s like advertising a car by saying “it uses gasoline!” Obviously gas helps the car go, but the user of the car just wants to go places cheaply and reliably

easterncalculus 3mo ago

In addition to the wonders of the physical world, national parks, lakefront properties, skiing locations becoming owned by and run for the rich, advertising is moving further from the consumer to investors, their true market. They don't need the poors anymore.

xiphias2 3mo ago

What's interesting is that all big LLM providers figured out that the revenue comes from coding as it can be trained with RL rewards. It means that most people will never understand how fast the landscape is moving: non-coding and non-homework use cases didn't change that much since last year.

warecho 3mo ago

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