4 ms·

The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

77 points by hasudon7171 3mo ago

sirnicolaz 3mo ago
Ironic that this very article has been partially written with AI... kind of lost the drive to read it
- trollbridge 3mo ago
  Yep. And if you want to integrate AI into your products, like we are currently doing, you are best off just delivering features / products and concealing the fact it's "AI" instead of putting it front and centre. AI has a rather tarnished brand amongst many groups of people.
  - verzali 3mo ago
    More subtle thought-out AI tends to work better than AI for the sake of it anyway. If you deliver something useful, people will end up using it. A lot of current AI use is not particularly useful though.
  - okamiueru 3mo ago
    How much of that is just pattern recognition? I dislike AI because the result has consistently been bad. The most enthusiastic AI co-workers are producing garbage at a 100x rate, while the non-enthusiastic responsible ones are left reading and reviewing it.
    - trollbridge 3mo ago
      Right. So I don’t clog things up with an annoying, useless chatbot or the little AI sparkle symbol.
- Analemma_ 3mo ago
  Remember to flag it, I've been doing this consistently with AI slopicles. Eventually we can build a social consensus around this and stop having to see them.
- jsnell 3mo ago
  I'd say "entirely", not "partially". Flagged the article.
werber 3mo ago
Spotify being listed as one of the brands doing AI right is jarring to me. It’s the only one of the companies mentioned where I’ve had multiple conversations with non tech people about how much they hate their AI usage. Specifically in their case the drift to AI produced and performed music in the playlists that are not explicitly labeled as AI. And there seems to be a nuance to what uses people are ok with, large language models for personal use, ok, generative ai in any creative capacity, offensive. Obviously anecdotal, but this article was very far from the reality I’m experiencing
- shevy-java 3mo ago
  Now, personally I want AI to disappear, but music is one of the few areas where AI COULD be potentially useful. The reason I say this is because for music, the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it. I still think humans are better than AI, but there were audio tracks fully AI generated which was not bad. It does not convince me into one of those humans who fell for the skynet trap and embraced AI, but I also can not say that all of AI is totally useless - just 99.9%.
  - cmiles74 3mo ago
    I feel that "good" music has some emotional resonance with me, at some level. In my opinion AI won't ever be able generate what I'm looking for, it always strikes me as somewhat bland or seems too much like another track. Background music in distracting environments, where the listening is maybe the third or fourth thing I'm doing, maybe AI will be acceptable.
    - werber 3mo ago
      https://www.audible.ca/fr_CA/pd/What-Could-Go-Wrong-Livre-Audio/B0F4GFLBCZ https://www.audible.ca/fr_CA/pd/What-Could-Go-Wrong-Livre-Au... , this podcast (which I guess is now only available as a book) was really interesting, about 3/4 of the way through they tackle the emotional resonance bit, with one of the people from Broken Social Scene, and the artist kinda breaks down because the AI model they were experimenting with was able to replicate the "humanness" of music that loved. All in all it was a really interesting program, but the music section was probably the most fascinating.
HyperL0gi 3mo ago
"Consumers have developed pattern recognition for AI-generated content." The irony of reading an article that talks about AI slop that clearly seems to have been written by AI. Hey, I could be completely wrong, and it wasn't, but there are so many flags. Do I care? Not really, but whoever wrote this is right. I guess we developed a pattern recognition for these things
- RetroTechie 3mo ago
  Agreed. But it's also indicating the current crop of AI generates certain patterns that are detectable. What if it advances to a point where people can't? Chances are that's anywhere between "we're already past that point" and "could be a decade or more away" depending on the type of work. Imho AI is ultimately just a tool. Use where it improves things, avoid where it doesn't. Right now companies seem to try & shove it everywhere. Which clearly isn't working.
  - HyperL0gi 3mo ago
    What bothers me is that now I struggle to pass that "this is clearly AI slop" impression and just keep reading. Sometimes the content written by AI is good, but it’s really hard to convince myself to just keep going when I detect it in the first 10 seconds.
Avicebron 3mo ago
It's not just AI first companies..there's a place near me that tried to usr AI images in their social media ads. Completely blew up their relationship with the community. People would have preferred a cell phonr picture of their actual food to an AI generated approximation..
- graypegg 3mo ago
  I've noticed this happening more and more! Mainly with restaurants! There's an indian place just down the street from my place with a menu composed of entirely (badly) AI generated curry pictures in the window. It turns everyone off eating there because it feels like they're somehow lying about what they sell. I get that curry is probably hard to photograph unprofessionally and still make it look appetizing, but I would've preferred Vindaloo [price] [short description] over Vindaloo [price] |red curdled horror| [emoji riddled description] |in a weird bowl |
donaldstuck 3mo ago
It almost feels like AI is a hype and is used by the NFT/blockchain/crypto/web3 grifters as yet another vehicle to grift people right into their graves. Fun times.
- throwaway27448 3mo ago
  AI as a term has always been a marketing tool aimed more at investors and executives than users.
  - criddell 3mo ago
    Always? Maybe for the past 15-20 years but for the 50 years before that there wasn't much investment or interest from executives. AI was mostly about research and niche applications.
    - throwaway27448 3mo ago
      AI has always been a marketing term. As soon as it has a useful application it is named around its utility. Search, recognition, generation, classification, etc. AI is the term you use when you can't easily describe what you're doing. It's true that in the early years, much of the investment was public money—but the above still stands.
  - runarberg 3mo ago
    This is true and is the reason I personally have always hated the term. This time around things are different. This time we also hate the technology. Personally I used to love Markov Chains, Kalman filters, Supervised learning, etc. and resent the fact that people called it AI. But LLM has nothing but hate from my heart. Ironically, I love that people call it AI, and do so enthusiastically my self. A bad and hyped up technology deserves a bad and hyped up name.
throwaway27448 3mo ago
> Spotify's personalization exemplifies invisible AI done right. Ironically, I can't think of a platform that does personalization worse. Not only does it regularly surface music I don't like, it surfaces the exact same music I don't like over and over again. I don't know whether this is bad recommendation or their pushing music on me (ie payola) but it's supremely irritating. I would have thought that adding semantic search to a photos app might be a better example of good AI, not these bolted-on-top examples.
shevy-java 3mo ago
"When consumers believe emotional marketing communications are written by AI rather than humans, they judge them as less authentic, feel moral disgust and show weaker engagement and purchase intentions. This happens even when the content is otherwise identical." Well, in general I do not care either way. I regard all ads as propaganda that attempts to steal my time. However had, even then it is indeed true that AI just is an additional annoyance factor, because it means that no real human really invested time - just AI slop that is spammed down onto people, and wastes their time. So I don't agree with the premise in the article to begin with, but most assuredly it is also true that AI slop just is pissing off people. I am noticing this on youtube too and although I don't have data, it seems that enough people were annoyed that the no-AI movement gained more grounds in the last some weeks. Hopfully we'll eventually reach AI extinction - not likely to happen, since some humans are already addicted to AI (see all "contributed with claude" on github spam), but I regard this as a noble goal. Rid this world of AI.
croisillon 3mo ago
the big far-right party in Austria recently did an AI poster for their 70 year celebration, and there really were 2 type of responses - not their target group, thinking it was cringe and boomer-ish - their uncritical target group, who loved a polished picture of blonde people
- red-iron-pine 3mo ago
  link me
  - croisillon 3mo ago
    careful what you wish: https://www.facebook.com/fpoe/photos/-70-jahre-fp%C3%B6-das-gro%C3%9Fe-volksfest-in-wien-freut-euch-auf-ein-gro%C3%9Fes-freiheitlich/1654500356038419/ https://www.facebook.com/fpoe/photos/-70-jahre-fp%C3%B6-das-...
feverzsj 3mo ago
It sure is a silver bullet ... to end your business.
whynotisay 3mo ago
[flagged]
- xgulfie 3mo ago
  > Including young illustrators on Twitter with a whole audience convinced they are drawing by hand. that's called being a grifter not an illustrator
- cmiles74 3mo ago
  Strong disagreement on this one, I think the coverage has proven that the current crop if anti-LLM sentiment is a much bigger thing then whatever is happening on this website. In the case of AI generated imagery, maybe it will get to the point where people can't tell just by looking at it. If it does, at what cost? It seems to me that token cost is rising, I can't help but wonder if hiring an illustrator might end up being less expensive in the long run.
  - whynotisay 3mo ago
    [dead]
- RiverCrochet 3mo ago
  Consumers and gamers are already alienated. If the price of RAM keeps going up I'm not sure much technology will actually be here to stay. What's the point of AI "art" anyway if everyone needs $10,000 devices to interact with the content? AI isn't going to raise wages, it's just going to enable people to produce more for the same wage.
  - whynotisay 3mo ago
    [dead]
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
  > Soon - and even now - there are people getting away with using it that you guys can’t detect. Sure, but that seems largely irrelevant to what's being discussed here. The public in general is anti-AI, so any marketeer thinking that associating AI with their brand is a positive is misreading the room, and any thinking that the public are unable to detect it most of the time, especially in something like a video, are just wrong. Is that going to change - will AI-generated content become harder to detect? Sure, but "we know the public hate this, but we can con them" doesn't really sound like a recipe for success. In a world increasingly awash with AI generated content, it's easy to predict that human-generated content and interaction is going to be increasingly valued, and smart companies will realize this.
kristianc 3mo ago
It's kind of ironic, if this article was written about programming, it would be immediately flagged as being too thin and written almost completely with AI.

77 points by hasudon7171 3mo ago

sirnicolaz 3mo ago

Ironic that this very article has been partially written with AI... kind of lost the drive to read it

trollbridge 3mo ago
Yep. And if you want to integrate AI into your products, like we are currently doing, you are best off just delivering features / products and concealing the fact it's "AI" instead of putting it front and centre. AI has a rather tarnished brand amongst many groups of people.
- verzali 3mo ago
  More subtle thought-out AI tends to work better than AI for the sake of it anyway. If you deliver something useful, people will end up using it. A lot of current AI use is not particularly useful though.
- okamiueru 3mo ago
  How much of that is just pattern recognition? I dislike AI because the result has consistently been bad. The most enthusiastic AI co-workers are producing garbage at a 100x rate, while the non-enthusiastic responsible ones are left reading and reviewing it.
  - trollbridge 3mo ago
    Right. So I don’t clog things up with an annoying, useless chatbot or the little AI sparkle symbol.
Analemma_ 3mo ago
Remember to flag it, I've been doing this consistently with AI slopicles. Eventually we can build a social consensus around this and stop having to see them.
jsnell 3mo ago
I'd say "entirely", not "partially". Flagged the article.

werber 3mo ago

Spotify being listed as one of the brands doing AI right is jarring to me. It’s the only one of the companies mentioned where I’ve had multiple conversations with non tech people about how much they hate their AI usage. Specifically in their case the drift to AI produced and performed music in the playlists that are not explicitly labeled as AI. And there seems to be a nuance to what uses people are ok with, large language models for personal use, ok, generative ai in any creative capacity, offensive. Obviously anecdotal, but this article was very far from the reality I’m experiencing

shevy-java 3mo ago
Now, personally I want AI to disappear, but music is one of the few areas where AI COULD be potentially useful. The reason I say this is because for music, the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it. I still think humans are better than AI, but there were audio tracks fully AI generated which was not bad. It does not convince me into one of those humans who fell for the skynet trap and embraced AI, but I also can not say that all of AI is totally useless - just 99.9%.
- cmiles74 3mo ago
  I feel that "good" music has some emotional resonance with me, at some level. In my opinion AI won't ever be able generate what I'm looking for, it always strikes me as somewhat bland or seems too much like another track. Background music in distracting environments, where the listening is maybe the third or fourth thing I'm doing, maybe AI will be acceptable.
  - werber 3mo ago
    https://www.audible.ca/fr_CA/pd/What-Could-Go-Wrong-Livre-Audio/B0F4GFLBCZ https://www.audible.ca/fr_CA/pd/What-Could-Go-Wrong-Livre-Au... , this podcast (which I guess is now only available as a book) was really interesting, about 3/4 of the way through they tackle the emotional resonance bit, with one of the people from Broken Social Scene, and the artist kinda breaks down because the AI model they were experimenting with was able to replicate the "humanness" of music that loved. All in all it was a really interesting program, but the music section was probably the most fascinating.

HyperL0gi 3mo ago

"Consumers have developed pattern recognition for AI-generated content." The irony of reading an article that talks about AI slop that clearly seems to have been written by AI. Hey, I could be completely wrong, and it wasn't, but there are so many flags. Do I care? Not really, but whoever wrote this is right. I guess we developed a pattern recognition for these things

RetroTechie 3mo ago
Agreed. But it's also indicating the current crop of AI generates certain patterns that are detectable. What if it advances to a point where people can't? Chances are that's anywhere between "we're already past that point" and "could be a decade or more away" depending on the type of work. Imho AI is ultimately just a tool. Use where it improves things, avoid where it doesn't. Right now companies seem to try & shove it everywhere. Which clearly isn't working.
- HyperL0gi 3mo ago
  What bothers me is that now I struggle to pass that "this is clearly AI slop" impression and just keep reading. Sometimes the content written by AI is good, but it’s really hard to convince myself to just keep going when I detect it in the first 10 seconds.

Avicebron 3mo ago

It's not just AI first companies..there's a place near me that tried to usr AI images in their social media ads. Completely blew up their relationship with the community. People would have preferred a cell phonr picture of their actual food to an AI generated approximation..

graypegg 3mo ago
I've noticed this happening more and more! Mainly with restaurants! There's an indian place just down the street from my place with a menu composed of entirely (badly) AI generated curry pictures in the window. It turns everyone off eating there because it feels like they're somehow lying about what they sell. I get that curry is probably hard to photograph unprofessionally and still make it look appetizing, but I would've preferred Vindaloo [price] [short description] over Vindaloo [price] |red curdled horror| [emoji riddled description] |in a weird bowl |

donaldstuck 3mo ago

It almost feels like AI is a hype and is used by the NFT/blockchain/crypto/web3 grifters as yet another vehicle to grift people right into their graves. Fun times.

throwaway27448 3mo ago
AI as a term has always been a marketing tool aimed more at investors and executives than users.
- criddell 3mo ago
  Always? Maybe for the past 15-20 years but for the 50 years before that there wasn't much investment or interest from executives. AI was mostly about research and niche applications.
  - throwaway27448 3mo ago
    AI has always been a marketing term. As soon as it has a useful application it is named around its utility. Search, recognition, generation, classification, etc. AI is the term you use when you can't easily describe what you're doing. It's true that in the early years, much of the investment was public money—but the above still stands.
- runarberg 3mo ago
  This is true and is the reason I personally have always hated the term. This time around things are different. This time we also hate the technology. Personally I used to love Markov Chains, Kalman filters, Supervised learning, etc. and resent the fact that people called it AI. But LLM has nothing but hate from my heart. Ironically, I love that people call it AI, and do so enthusiastically my self. A bad and hyped up technology deserves a bad and hyped up name.

throwaway27448 3mo ago

> Spotify's personalization exemplifies invisible AI done right. Ironically, I can't think of a platform that does personalization worse. Not only does it regularly surface music I don't like, it surfaces the exact same music I don't like over and over again. I don't know whether this is bad recommendation or their pushing music on me (ie payola) but it's supremely irritating. I would have thought that adding semantic search to a photos app might be a better example of good AI, not these bolted-on-top examples.

shevy-java 3mo ago

"When consumers believe emotional marketing communications are written by AI rather than humans, they judge them as less authentic, feel moral disgust and show weaker engagement and purchase intentions. This happens even when the content is otherwise identical." Well, in general I do not care either way. I regard all ads as propaganda that attempts to steal my time. However had, even then it is indeed true that AI just is an additional annoyance factor, because it means that no real human really invested time - just AI slop that is spammed down onto people, and wastes their time. So I don't agree with the premise in the article to begin with, but most assuredly it is also true that AI slop just is pissing off people. I am noticing this on youtube too and although I don't have data, it seems that enough people were annoyed that the no-AI movement gained more grounds in the last some weeks. Hopfully we'll eventually reach AI extinction - not likely to happen, since some humans are already addicted to AI (see all "contributed with claude" on github spam), but I regard this as a noble goal. Rid this world of AI.

croisillon 3mo ago

the big far-right party in Austria recently did an AI poster for their 70 year celebration, and there really were 2 type of responses - not their target group, thinking it was cringe and boomer-ish - their uncritical target group, who loved a polished picture of blonde people

red-iron-pine 3mo ago
link me
- croisillon 3mo ago
  careful what you wish: https://www.facebook.com/fpoe/photos/-70-jahre-fp%C3%B6-das-gro%C3%9Fe-volksfest-in-wien-freut-euch-auf-ein-gro%C3%9Fes-freiheitlich/1654500356038419/ https://www.facebook.com/fpoe/photos/-70-jahre-fp%C3%B6-das-...

feverzsj 3mo ago

It sure is a silver bullet ... to end your business.

whynotisay 3mo ago

[flagged]

xgulfie 3mo ago
> Including young illustrators on Twitter with a whole audience convinced they are drawing by hand. that's called being a grifter not an illustrator
cmiles74 3mo ago
Strong disagreement on this one, I think the coverage has proven that the current crop if anti-LLM sentiment is a much bigger thing then whatever is happening on this website. In the case of AI generated imagery, maybe it will get to the point where people can't tell just by looking at it. If it does, at what cost? It seems to me that token cost is rising, I can't help but wonder if hiring an illustrator might end up being less expensive in the long run.
- whynotisay 3mo ago
  [dead]
RiverCrochet 3mo ago
Consumers and gamers are already alienated. If the price of RAM keeps going up I'm not sure much technology will actually be here to stay. What's the point of AI "art" anyway if everyone needs $10,000 devices to interact with the content? AI isn't going to raise wages, it's just going to enable people to produce more for the same wage.
- whynotisay 3mo ago
  [dead]
HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
> Soon - and even now - there are people getting away with using it that you guys can’t detect. Sure, but that seems largely irrelevant to what's being discussed here. The public in general is anti-AI, so any marketeer thinking that associating AI with their brand is a positive is misreading the room, and any thinking that the public are unable to detect it most of the time, especially in something like a video, are just wrong. Is that going to change - will AI-generated content become harder to detect? Sure, but "we know the public hate this, but we can con them" doesn't really sound like a recipe for success. In a world increasingly awash with AI generated content, it's easy to predict that human-generated content and interaction is going to be increasingly valued, and smart companies will realize this.

kristianc 3mo ago

It's kind of ironic, if this article was written about programming, it would be immediately flagged as being too thin and written almost completely with AI.