>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today
This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more.
Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.
I recently took my car to the dealership to get my A/C fixed. On the drive home, I discovered that they'd somehow screwed up my blinkers when they were fixing their A/C. When I called the next day to explain the problem, confirm they knew it was their issue to fix at no cost and to schedule a time to come in I got an AI Assistant. An AI Assistant that has not been trained to expect an issue to be their fault and who kept trying to direct me book on their site or to book a new appointment to get the problem fixed at my cost through her.
The dealerships' decision to hand things over to AI, and to choose to focus that AI on only booking appointments instead of fixing problems is a proverbial F U to me. It's the dealership shifting more work on to me. It's disrespectful and wasteful of my time.
What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest
They don't use their own product, and they don't want their engineers to use their product either. They want velocity, and you can't have velocity if you're bogged down by doing end-to-end testing and finding friction and whatnot.
Its being pounded into their head almost daily (and from all directions) that AI is the future and the more AI the better. Their boss, the industry, other managers, heck probably even their children.
So any big AI initiative they are apart of had succeeded before it even starts!
They care more about short term cost reduction than long term effects of upsetting customers. Even moreso if there is a lack of significant competition, as is often the case for companies doing this, since customers can't just easily switch to something else.
I think it is not cost reduction. AI is not cheap. I think it is mimetic and FOMO driven, they think the press release packed with em dashes will 10x their stock price or something.
I recommend everyone in this thread call OpenAI and talk that support agent. I had some issue and tried to trip it up, spoke naturally and ambiguously, and it actually did a pretty good job.
I feel like this is an example of Sturgeon's Law - almost every thread can be filled with complaints, because most everything is crap.
What's more interesting is the cases where it isn't. Those prove that the idea can be good, but it's obviously a lot more work than "have an LLM answer customer questions".
They don't care. They have metrics to meet and don't care how. Full stop.
Have you seen "Severance"? It's a wonderful show that shows us a sick truth:
Many people are a different person at work. That different person is devoid of morals & ethics. They are machines intent on meeting metric targets. Nothing else, not managers, not employees, base people, just machines hitting targets they didn't decide on.
It's like how these automated call handlers that say "Just tell us what you need help with" and then no matter how you phrase the sentence it just doesn't understand what you mean. Great idea in theory, horrendous execution. Bonus points if it automatically disconnects after 3 attempts without finding the right magic word from its dictionary of options.
The answer I always give to "tell us what you need help with" is "representative" or "speak to a human". I despise the automated systems that respond to that with "before we can route you to a human, we need to know what you're calling about". Fortunately, some of those will take the continued statement of "representative" as a sign that they should give up and give you a human to talk to. Not all of them, though.
Have you encountered those voicemail AI customer service representatives? Those can't route you anywhere so you're stuck talking to a robot.
I was just trying to schedule my daughter's dentist appointment and had to spend 10 minutes talking to an AI when I could have found a time that worked in 30 seconds with a human. And at the end of the whole process, she got my daughter's name wrong. It was demoralizing.
Most phone systems will put you through to a human if you pound the 0 enough. The better ones will tell the rep that you did so and they know you are mad as hell and won’t take it anymore and you never have to make the case that they’re going to lose $100,000 NPV because they won’t give you a $500 resolution.
Oh fucking hell yes, how much I hate that shit. Bring back the "press 5 for XYZ" phone trees, I never have problems getting the systems to understand what I'm trying to indicate there.
I definitely prefer phone trees the ai agents. Something that has never made sense to me is why we even need most of the phone trees. Could they not just have separate numbers? Billing is X num. CS is Y num. Save the human species minutes for every fucking call.
I realize the decision makers have been prioritizing the opposite. Making calls take as long as possible but I have no idea what is incentivizing them to do that.
They're just filters to see if you actually need help. "They're willing to sit here for 4 minutes listening to prompts and hitting buttons, they must need help" because as we all know, in most cases it doesn't matter which sequence of numbers you press, the same person is going to answer the phone, or same group of people.
I would love to see an app/overlay that displays what each option is during the call. Some system where you don’t have to listen to the whole list of “press x for y”.
I have no idea how to go about implementing such a thing, but it would be cool if someone picked up the idea and ran with it.
Android does this fairly well for me - it will list out the options as they are spoken, and you can click on them directly to type the number. I believe (but haven't seen this recently) it will pre-render the options before they are read if it has knowledge of that phone tree.
Really? The modern ones I’ve run into lately are like 100x better than the old flows. “Press 1 for sales. Press 2 to know our hours. Press 3 if you have a ticket. Press 4 to hear our website address…”.
Of course nothing beats a human with real agency at the company but like, these modern agents could be 100x better than what airlines and internet service providers currently have.
The ever dreaded automated phone systems are more tolerable than the AI driven phone systems. The press 1 for... never tried to make you think someone was actually listening to you, yet the AI services are made to come across like you are talking to a human. Don't try to make people think it's a human.
I think the only place so far where I have actually preferred the AI version was when my phone provider switched from a "dumb" chat bot that ostensibly used natural language but rarely parsed anything successfully.
A local pizza place (Tribute Pizza) switched its phone over to an AI assistant that goes out of its way to appear human to such a degree that it inserts random "restaurant bustle" sound effects into the call so it sounds like you're talking to someone standing in a crowded restaurant.
The subterfuge of layering in sound effects to make idiots think they were still talking to a human was a bridge too far and I swore off ever giving my business to them again.
Considering the many embarrassing failures huge fast food chains have had trying to get AI order takers in their drive-throughs I'd be very concerned about an AI at some random local pizza place getting my order accurately
This reminds me that I have to write my dentist. They replaced their beep answering machine with an AI chatbot, and the experience is horrible. I just want to say what I want, have it transcribed to text, and then have a human do something about it. It. I don't want to have to slowly explain to a bot who is just going to do the same thing.
Plus, the first time you encounter it, it doesn't identify itself as a bot for a couple sentences. And it's convincing enough that you fall for it. The feeling of being let down and realizing that you were just talking to a chump robot is severe, and is now associated with my dentist's brand.
Same experience calling a dental office recently. The voice on the other side introduced itself by name and had this uncanny valley quality where I wasn't quite 100% sure it was a bot and felt weird asking it outright. Made for an awkward conversation. Once it became clear that I was, in fact, talking to AI, I quickly wrapped it up but came away feeling quite negative about the experience. It's not even that it gave bad responses, but pretending to be a human is a step too far.
Dental practices are notorious for being badly run: dentists often have great technical skills but are lacking in people skills, business skills, common sense, etc. Seyle in The Stress of Life talks about early research about how many dentists struggle because of this.
Dentists frequently get talked into MLM scams (which they have a lot of money to lose on) or Scientology management training (which they have a lot of money to lose on.)
Given all that many of them might be happier if they work for private equity, and that trend is stronger with more women entering the field. I dunno if women are really worse at running a business but I think they are better at recognizing that they're not good at running a business when they're not.
I really want to agree and I can fill the rage building inside me when I talk to one... but on the flip side I just had a conversation with the Amazon one and it fixed my weird incorrect region/country problem in about 5 minutes. I was filled with rage the entire time, but it fixed my problem.
I've recently come to the thought that the reason why I find AI so snake-oily is because it isn't solving the bottlenecks of the use-cases it is being applied to.
The problem with customer service was never the frontline support agents but rather that these frontline agents are not empowered to solve the problems they encounter. I once had a human agent admit to me I was wrongly charged but they could not refund me on the spot because of protocol. Replace that agent with the smartest model and it still wouldn't have improved that interaction! (Of course, the business saves money if the AI costs a fraction of a human agent's salary.)
I'll take a shot in the dark and bet there was always an obscure/poorly documented way to solve your problem and that the AI could just find it in its playbook faster; it's search after all! It's also not inconceivable to go as far as to wager that a _human agent_ would just have been as effective; maybe the protocol to do it wasn't some obscure procedure for customer support.
----
That said, this is why I'm in disbelief that AI is bringing in as much value to the table as claimed. I realized that in software, it was never shipping the code that was the bottleneck to profit. I could be the mythical 10x productive engineer but all my output is still gonna be gated by things like testing of all sorts, customer acquisition, product development and design. Testing and product dev you could maybe automate but only after putting in considerable legwork yourself.
And of course, shipping 10x more features does not mean you'll get 10x more profit, not even that you'll get 10x more customers.
I have a friend working for an international law firm which has recently made a big push for responsible AI use. (I won't say which firm but the first partner name has to do with croissants and they recently organized an internal AI congress in Spain.) So, they are paying for AI subscriptions but I sincerely wonder if that's adding to their bottom line since their profit is bottlenecked by (a) how much billable hours they can account for and (b) the judicial process which famously moves at a glacial pace.
It's just a pattern I repeatedly notice when I look closer into things. And of course, as we all know, the cost of AI services today is still heavily subsidized by VC money. When that money is gone, I worry we'll be stuck with _expensive_ AI-centric workflows that's not really adding value to the business.
IMO it also depends on having a working alternative for when the fuzzy automated system fails to work... except that's the stuff companies want to eliminate in order to (theoretically) save money.
I don't immediately hate talking to an chatbot, my dislike comes from chatbots that sound like humans but can't actually do anything useful. Maybe it just searches the KB and returns an article or maybe it just collects information for the ticket and I still need to wait for a human to reply back. Like I know how to search the KB, I wouldn't be trying to talk to support if I didn't have a real issue. Or it takes forever giving my information to a seemingly real person only to be told to wait, just let me fill out a form and give me a queue ETA. And half the time the real agent can't see the AI messages so I'm stuck repeating myself. Or my question is a very simple one that an AI agent could have the capability of figuring out (is the system down? Unlock my account, etc) but it can't because it's incapable of doing anything other than maybe searching the KB.
It's like you hired the dumbest idiot to answer support phone calls who can't do anything other than cold transferring me to someone that can do stuff. It seriously makes me reconsider doing business with them. What critical expense did they neglect in order to have the funds for an AI idiot? It just feels like corner cutting or something to impress stakeholders that doesn't actually improve product quality or worker efficiency, it's just a vanity project.
If you're not willing to build an AI agent that can actually do real work while also being hardened against exploits (see Instagram), do not spend the money. You are either just going to waste money on the dumbest receptionist money can buy or you are giving away the keys to the kingdom to anyone with a clever prompt.
My main issue with these systems is that they tend to not be able to do anything beyond what I can do myself in whatever self-service portal is available. If I'm calling, it's because I need support beyond what the bot can probably provide, and it just becomes a matter of arguing with the robot to get to a human who can actually solve my problem.
I’ve had to use one of these to book something with a service company. It was horrible. It’s like talking to Pinnochio… there’s nothing there. And it’s trying to sound human and conversational. It’s creepy and annoying.
Just give me a human being or a plain voice menu.
Businesses just don’t want to pay people if they can help it. Some things are inefficient. Get over it.
I was helping an 80+ year old with a phone problem this week. Dealing with the AI CSA was so frustrating. I don't think this lady was ready to burn down data centers that morning, but I think she was looking for a pitchfork by the afternoon.
Part of the problem is that even if you did a good job it doesn't really matter because the rest of the industry isn't, so no user wants to give you a chance
It depends. Sometimes I have really stupid questions and I don't want to read the website, when I know I don't annoy a human when I click "chat" I may use it to ask my stupid question.
But this is a exception most of the time I just try to confuse the AI to get to an actual human faster.
People say jobs with the "human touch" will stay relevant after AGI. And I'm like have you seen customer service? I can't even find the phone number anymore on amazon
Whats implied there is that the "human touch" will become a luxury.
I have a hard time seeing a future where retail doesn't bifurcate even further into ultra low margin, happy-path optimized megastores and concierge-style high touch boutiques. Places like Crutchfield that split the difference nicely seem to be a dying breed.
I immediately skip all youtube ads that are AI generated, and I can easily spot them. Not just that, I am planning to actively avoid those brands that are doing this. A small way to send a message that this form of AI sucks. In addition, I make it a point to compliment humans that assist me in customer support, and ask them to tell their management that they need to hire more humans.
The problem is that your principled opposition to these ads by voting with your wallet does nothing. The advantage to the advertiser is that AI allows them to vomit out ads even more cheaply and to make even more micro-targeted versions of them, and the greater number of suckers sold to more than offsets principled opposers.
The real solution would be the ability to block AI-generated adverts completely in your browser, forcing advertisers to send you non-AI ads if they want your attention.
> The real solution would be the ability to block AI-generated adverts
To speak from a cynical step further along the spectrum (e.g. "aacktually the real real problem is...") I submit that "voting with your eyeballs" is just a weaker form of "voting with your wallet", which is itself a trap [1] that empirically doesn't work and mainly exists to dis-empower the public.
In other words, blocking the adverts would be nice, but unless it's part of an organized boycott it probably won't affect much either.
If I were a manager I would be excited as well. Product quality doesn’t seem to be a metric that is actually correlated with executive bonuses, reducing cost is.
It’s why enshitification is so common. Create a tool that quantifies quality in a usable way as a metric and you change the entire economy.
> even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story.
::2065, in a US Social Studies class::
And that, children, across many industries, along with the unfortunately-timed chatbot craze, then believed to be real AI, is the surprisingly simple origin of Corporate Optimistic Cynical Braindeadism. It’s a bit wordy, but it was LLM-generated before the Big Correction, and nobody bothered to fix it.
That’s because customer support should be the absolute last place that an AI agent is used that might be one of the few places you will need humans in the loop for a while because that’s where people go when everything else doesn’t work
>Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.
I bet you did a bad job with your solution.
I hate AI (or humans following scripts like robots) customer service because they don't actually provide service. They jerk you around in circles, don't understand basic things, can't help, and take forever.
People don't hate customer service when they feel like they have been served.
I've actually been told by my teacher friends who used to complain about too much AI that their high school students are starting to reverse course here, and are now bullying each other for actual or perceived AI use. It's become cringe.
Sure but like.. talking to a chatbot is like the most un-nerdy in spirit thing you can do next to playing football. Nerds are, imo, attracted to esoteric complexity, long bouts of focused, actual, solitude getting to the bottom of the something. it's why they are stereotypically socially misadjusted sometimes.
A "dork" is someone who likes AI a lot I think... They usually revolve more around a product or brand, and focus more on how great it is and everyone should like it. Rather than the "you wouldn't understand leave me alone" of the nerd.
AIUI, most of the AI usage by students is seen by themselves as cheating, and cheating is largely for the tasks that you don't care about. Which means there's likely a strong association with students of generative AI work products with "we don't care about the quality of this stuff."
Rampant use of AI for cheating is not at all incompatible with negative opinions of AI.
> Rampant use of AI for cheating is not at all incompatible with negative opinions of AI.
Possibly. Either way it (for me at least) neatly highlights why AI will succeed.
The students you talk about don't abstain from AI use entirely - they utilise AI for things they consider 'unworthy' of their attention/effort.
That is precisely the market AI will capture first - the tasks and processes that people (in general) have to do but don't really have any passion/interest in doing and for which perfection isn't critical.
And what may surprise many people in this thread (given its flow so far)...there are a whole heap of things that you and I care about, that 10s if not 100s of millions of other people consider 'unworthy' of their attention/effort and for which they will happily make do with a 'sub par' AI experience if it's cheaper, easier, more convenient.
I don't thinks so because the ai bot will reliably give you the answers you could already get from the website to begin with and will never solve your problem. If people are calling or opening an interactive chat, this is because all automatized procedures have already failed and you are in a situation not supported by them.
I think people clicking through websites will be viewed the same as people going to the library and reading through books to research.
You just get the information you need way quicker.
Recently I had to make changes to cancel my flight. Luckily the website had an agent and I used it to cancel my flight. Didn't have to wait for an email/chat or worse call.
I even rescheduled my flight using the same website agent.
I'd tend to say that it is probably because they haven't yet crippled their AI bot with the same dark patterns (trying to make you select insurance, paid selection of seats, additional luggages, rented car at the airport) as they do on the website.
Airlines websites could be so much simpler and quick to use if they weren't designed to be full of traps.
Don't expect that edge to persist indefinitely, they are in the adoption phase.
The problem is that the agents can not be trusted to do things so at the end of the day you wade through loads of crap and they cant solve your problem because they usually only have the same powers you do.
Great if grandma doesnt know how to use a web form, fucking useless for everyone else.
People in their 60s or older get confused. People in their 40s or 50s tolerate it better. Younger people hate it with a passion and will hate anything that it touches.
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.
>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".
Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.
So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.
At least your example IDs itself as an AI agent. The ones I've come across hide it but it becomes obvious with responses like "I don't have access to that information" or something a human would never say. I had a dealership give me one of those, so I hung up on it and called a different dealership where I was connected to an actual human. Guess which one got my business...
>In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked.
Just the other day I was trying to fix someone's laptop and reflexively pressed (what I thought was) the context menu key, only to find no context menu opened, and instead a Copilot window right in the middle of the screen.
> Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more
Most egregiously: VSCode.
No, i absolutely never in my life will want Copilot to summarize anything for me and yet guess what button appeared in the UI and i accidentally clicked on last night....
VSCodium was better on this front last time I tried it, and since Microsoft seems intent on allowing the Extensions to be a wildly insecure free-for-all, I am seeing fewer and fewer reasons to stick with the official version.
My LG one has had smomething like that - a coupkle of years old. Seems quite nifty though - it tumbles the load dry for a while and alledgely uses the patterm of weight shift to determine what kind of load it is - the materials etc - and adjusts the wash accordingly
One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.
I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!
This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
> The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:
> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.
Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.
Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.
It's somewhat fascinating to me that we are so far out in the weeds of stupidity in the modern era that the only things that were predicted accurately have to come from satire about "Nobody would ever be so stupid as to build or create this"
It drives me crazy that after every update the menu icons, like the browser, is in a completely different arbitrary place. And since Tesla doesn't want to allow Carplay I'm forced to use the slightly less than useful mobile web version of my favourite apps.
can you blame them? nondeterministic products have resulted in some of the most successful businesses of All Time (tiktok, reels, google search, product recommendations)
> I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
Incidentally, this is why I will never buy a Tesla. I used to want one pretty badly, I thought (and still think tbh) that they are very cool cars. I was even willing to barely tolerate using a touchscreen as the only interface. But to make that work safely, the controls need to be in the same exact place every time so that I can learn to manipulate them without looking at the screen. Moving stuff around willy nilly like Tesla does isn't just annoying, it's actively unsafe. So I'm not buying one and never will, because they have proved I can't trust them to act right.
I think you may be right. I enjoy tech and programming, but hardly any of my friends/family do. And nearly everyone in my inner circle (an admittedly small number of people, considering I'm an extreme introvert) condemns and avoids AI both for the reasons you mentioned and because they refuse to "outsource my brain to AI!"
In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).
I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.
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.
> how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists
Spotify was praised as an alternative to piracy that gave some money to artists at a price that consumers wouldn’t complain too much about.
You don’t have to look at Spotify, though. Look at all of the people who won’t even pay Spotify or Netflix rates for content because they know they can pay $0 to pirate it.
Sorry my friend, but Netflix is not a good product. It has a limited selection and, at least for my account, a lot of commercial ads. I am not pirating but I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
> I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
I don’t know what plan you were on, but mine doesn’t have ads.
This kind of proves my point, though: People don’t want to pay for things (including the ad-free level) so they use it to justify piracy as being superior for various reasons.
Sorry, my post was not clear. Today piracy is a superior choice. The bedt product Netflix offered me was when they shipped DVDs - their selection was immense (on par with Blockbuster). I could have pirated then (I was going once a year to my home country where DVDs were sold on open air markets) but I did no do that because was too much trouble.
When Netflix started to be online only I tagged along, and it was OK-ish - selection was not that great but but price was not big either and once in a while I would watch a movie. Today ads are very intrusive and the cost for no ads is $20 / month- which is not worth it for me. Compared to this, piracy is clearly a superior choice.
You're arguing an example because it doesn't appeal to you specifically. In other words, you're arguing an example with another example. There's plenty of people who would pay for Netflix and don't because they know they can pirate.
Kids of varying ages that I've spoken to often talk about the environmental impact (mind you, I live in a fairly liberal/left leaning part of the country), among other things.
At the risk of over generalising, I mostly hear a lot of shit talk from younger generations, distrust from millennials, and more excitement and interest from Gen-x-ish and older.
As with many things, there's a certain level of hypocrisy to the shit talking, because teachers are at the schools are complaining to parents about the kid's use of AI, and pointing out that they will automatically fail any writing that seems to be using AI.
AI has been a culturally radioactive PR disaster of truly epic proportions. Aside from whether or not it works, there are so many established catastrophically negative talking points - steals from creators, destroys the environment, is coming for your job - I'm not sure its reputation can be recovered.
Does it's reputation even matter? Everyone with money is pushing it, heavily. The government is even stepping in to stop any kind of punishment when it's factually shown that they are stealing water. The people will learn to tolerate it whether they like it or not, eventually.
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.
I actually don’t think most consumers care about that at all. Consumers loved Napster. They have no problem stealing from artists outright, let alone indirectly.
I think to consumers AI denotes lack of accountability or oversight. They think it might work - but it might not and no one will care.
For example, I’m doing work in standardized test prep and there are tons of new AI products and no one likes it. Consumers feel as if they will get subtle but important things wrong. Most of these companies are now trying to hide that they are using AI generated questions.
What it also hits on for the average person is the uncanny valley. It just feels bad to talk to something mimicrying a person. It feels like talking to an invader at a deep, survival level.
I bet lots of people would even be happy that artists get smacked because they see only high profile and rich artists.
Normal people don’t care about AI and are not afraid that it will take their jobs.
They are pissed off because of they are paying customers they expect some level of respect.
AI bots are slap in the face, they ask basic stuff that human operator should infer from the conversation. But you are hit with a dummy that doesn’t solve any of your issues and have to spend time explaining yourself.
Funny part is that’s exactly the same as low income lvl 1 support.
But there is no comparison study. My idea is people are equally pissed off by lvl 1 support that they have to explain stuff in detail and get no real resolution.
Mostly agreed. Practically speaking, phone support reps just follow a flowchart and scripts, so there's effectively no difference between getting an AI or a person (except in those cases where the STT can't make out what you're saying, but that can happen with a person too). But as you've correctly pointed out, it's about respect, and I suspect most people do find it slightly more disrespectful to be forced to talk to an AI instead of another person.
I think its more that AI is generally really badly implemented. It means we get a less qualitative experience, mainly on support, but also writing etc.
Outside of frontier model providers, the vast majority of "AI" branded products/features just don't feel high quality.
AI generated media (art, music, etc) is very repulsive to interact with and so many products feel like they have led with AI solutions to problems that don't exist.
In many cases "AI" signals some sort of betrayal to users, because it shows that the developer CAN drastically change the GUI to implement features it wants to implement, except in practice "AI" isn't a feature that provides tangible benefits to the user.
So you get the feeling of "you could have done this this WHOLE time?" + the fact they didn't do it for you but just to say they are using AI now.
If the developer wanted to please the users, they would instead implement features that users have been demanding for a while. That got a lower priority so that AI that nobody asked for could be implemented.
> What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job
My unpopular opinion is that many or maybe most people don’t care about this.
They don’t care about where the content came from or if the artists get paid for the work. If they can get something (an answer to their question, some output that finishes their homework, some writing for a work assignment) more easily and with less cost or effort then they want it that way.
Look at piracy for a similar topic: It’s not even a derivative work, it’s just taking straight from the artists while bypassing their payment ask. Yet even on Hacker News every piracy thread fills up with piracy apologia and people saying artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output or that IP rights shouldn’t exist. Many people just don’t care about this stuff even when it’s direct source content taken 1:1 without paying. They definitely don’t care if the tool they’re using to do their homework or write that work email was trained on it.
Downloading artists' songs is not equivalent to people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist. I really don't have a problem with people using AI to generate sounds/images for their own personal enjoyment, but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.
> artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output
The issue is the notion that an artist gets to control what one does with their personal property that isn't the artist's property. No one is saying artists shouldn't get paid. Artists should get paid but setting up a system that surveils everything I hear and see to enforce it is too much.
> Many people just don’t care about this stuff
I agree with this though I don't follow your tie-in to piracy. Most people do not really care about music, and the industry has known this and delivers most music through ad-supported channels and shapes what music production it can to fit this. The ugly truth is that there's probably a lot of people who wouldn't mind listening to AI radio, it's probably coming, and it will be good enough that a sizeable percentage of the population will enjoy it and not care.
The real art has always been outside of the industry though, and that won't change in the AI age.
> people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist.
> but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.
I think there's a fundamental problem with this line of argument, which is that it's naive elitism that's been historically leveraged since the 20th century at minimum. "Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!" with equivalencies for all mediums of digital art.
There's absolutely a reductionism I think that happens with naysaying generative AI, where it's almost a kind of naive agreement with the VC hypetrain. There's a belief that effective usage of AI is just dumping 20 words into a text input and the maximal quality it's capable of gets spit out 5 seconds later. It's the same variety of reductionism as above where ignorance of how wide the domain is precludes the ability to understand where the skill ceiling is (or what is even involved). The idea that this isn't even the tip of the iceberg nets an expectation that "advanced" AI usage extends to random prompt engineering at most.
Problematically, "AI generated" doesn't really say much about the process, intent, or really much of anything beyond a specific computational architecture being involved at some point of the workflow. It could mean they slapped a tweet-length stream of consciousness into a shitty web prompt, or it could mean constructing a complex pipeline, combining processing steps and multiple models like hotpatching synths, using an intuition built upon thousands of hours of learning their tools, using fine-tuning adaptations that they spent even more time building, and carefully analyzing and responding to the end result. In the former case, I don't think there's much artistry involved and it exclusively produces crap. I think it's a massive disservice to the latter however, to suggest it doesn't involve extensive artistry, or that the paradigm of the tools themselves strip the notion of art away.
I understand wholly why the first case gets primacy, but if we're to philosophize about these tools then I think we have to fully account for the second case.
I think the backlash is because there are people claiming "I made this!" for what is about as much involvement as pressing the big meal combo touch button on a fast food ordering kiosk.
Ironically, in the arts there are also some patrons who might feel this way when they commissioned some work. With a big enough purchase price, they think their role as a source of funds is creative.
Now with AI, we're speed running this whole experience among people who normally do not have exposure to this broad continuum of contradictory ideas.
I think there is some nuance between an individual downloading something (and in many countries it is outright legal or at least, alegal) and building billion-dollar companies on it.
You'll get to switch less soon as your tech friends get lost in their codebases, loose skills or jobs altogether and pick the side of your artist ones.
Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.
I've talked to doctors, drivers, lawyers etc. and most white collar and many blue collar jobs feel the threat. Which, based on various news, feel justified even if not immediate. Even if its not the same llm per se, but the word "AI" is already tarnished as scum backstabbing negative entity, I literally don't know a single person who sees it these days positively.
> Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.
I mean, I haven't seen AI being used to replace even the most menial jobs. Plenty of companies have been trying to use AI to do things, but embarrassing and costly failures and negative customer response has made progress very slow. How can a lawyer or a doctor be worried about AI replacing them when AI can't even replace the 15 year old worker taking orders at the McDonald's drive thru?
It also signals low effort or subpar quality too. Hey look we slapped gpt on our healthcare app. Is it useful? Not really but the ceo is excited about it
Reading the comments in this thread, I think it's difficult for some folks here to accept that many, many people outside their bubble genuinely despise what they're doing, and it's not just a misunderstanding or a matter of branding.
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.
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.
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)
There's an almost total, unprecedented disconnect between C-suite perceptions of AI and user perceptions.
In C-suites AI appears to be some kind of limitless source of goodness and profits, so companies must optimise hard for it, or risk getting left behind.
Everyone else is either "Has some uses if you steer it carefully" or "Hell no."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's one: AI democratizes the ability to produce software, which has mostly been an arcane craft wielded by a priestly class. Now anyone, if they know what they want and it isn't too complex, can talk to AI and get working (if not also janky) software in a very short amount of time. Hopefully this breaks the grip that platforms/large corporations have on personal software and the internet.
It's an incredible search, research, and learning tool, and far better than a search engine. You can get almost anything explained at any level up to undergrad, with the option to ask questions if you don't understand, and with links to references, so you can check that what you're learning is correct.
The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.
But the "research" you're getting from the AI is also low-quality content. And particularly susceptible to the X-Y problem because unless you're already learned in a subject you won't even know how to craft the prompt to get the answer you're looking for.
Isn’t that the case for tech outside of AI as well. My friends that work in tech mostly eschew it when at home. They aren’t connecting their light bulbs to the internet nor buying WiFi enabled fridges.
It seems half of them spend their spare time woodworking or gardening.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't understand people claiming all this "the average consumer doesn't like AI" stuff is useful at all, when AI companies are making stratospheric revenue, and ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website.
This is the problem with all of the recent “AI” crap that has been shoved into our devices.
We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face.
Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively making a worse UI and often providing little to no benefit.
Most consumers don’t actually care how their tech works, just that it does and gives them benefits.
The real thing i think people forget is that humans actually value time and effort from other humans. AI is often used by people who want to do neither and that's really what it boils down to.
Ask yourself, would you like to receive a christmas or birthday card with a personalized message or something produced you know was 100% produced by AI bot - even better when it has a hallucination in there.
I think most people would in fact prefer an artisanal chair if not for the price, not just "especially" accounting for price. Not a good comparison here though, because most products are not cheaper to the consumer due to AI - only cheaper (in theory) to the provider.
Bingo. They weren't paying for gmail before, and they still aren't paying for it now that it's more annoying than it used to be.
I suspect that, in many cases, AI features actually make a product more expensive for the operator. Imagine how much of doordash's money you could burn by telling its chatbot that the only way for you to figure out where the driver left your order is to create a todo app in React.
Everyone would prefer a nicer handmade chair (if not by the price difference).
Chairs are not comparable to OPs cards; writing on a card costs nothing (but intent, which seems to be in low stock these days).
Finally, factoring in the real operating cost, ongoing capital costs, and environmental/social externalities, the AI chair in your example would cost something like 1000x a handmade chair.
That one from IKEA was designed by actual people though. If I had a chair designed by robots it probably wouldn’t be as nice, comfortable and evidently, affordable.
This is so true. My wife loves knitting and frequently gets comments about her items of people asking if they could have her knit something for them. When she tells them that if she tripled the prices of a similar store-bought one, she'd still be making sweatshop wages, they go back to the mass produced version they already have pretty quick.
Everyone prefers an artisanal chair over one from IKEA. The only reason they go for the latter is because that's what they can afford, not because they would get that option if all else were equal.
One is the method of recording a message, the other is having something else completely draft a message for you.
The importance of a personal message is not just in the visual appearance or delivery, but that there has to be some emotional loading to even put the effort into drafting one.
With AI, it's a stupid prompt to get it to write trite poesy. It's meaningless and empty at its root. It's discourse with a nullity.
Nobody who values the human connections in their lives wants that. No matter what kind of marketing and fine print gets shoved and manipulated into their lives.
Perhaps, but you can tell that these cards were made by real people. The art, messages, etc. are all different with varying levels of humor, seriousness, etc. LLMs really seem to converge to specific patterns regardless of the task that are instantly identifiable and low quality. What ends up happening is that the person on the other end thinks “this guy is a moron, he needed a robot to write out a happy birthday card?” Sure getting the hallmark card is mass produced, but they really do hire real artists and writers to make these cards. The robot creates a converged output that is instantly identifiable and has perceived lower quality.
They have enough different cards that at least you know effort was put into choosing the card. Also effort was put into buying the card at a store, signing it (often/hopefully with a short message), and sending it.
I don’t really want to defend Hallmark too much but I’d argue they provide a means of low effort personalisation. You choose a design that reflects you and your relationship to the recipient. You write a personal message inside (hopefully). The alternative is creating a card from scratch which is a big step up in creativity and time requirement.
If you don't actually take the time to write something manually inside the card, that's as thoughtless asking an LLM to generate a birthday message to someone.
I've seen multiple examples of software with good working ML solutions toss them aside for generalized AI with worse results. The real shift here is an attempt at the "one input for everything" user interface without understanding there's extremely few use cases where that's actually the best interface for users.
They've regressed for a long time and there's no signal to consumers that "AI" is anything that "fixes" or brings back what was working.
The example I always give is when google maps got speech recognition, I could ask it "Hey google, what's the E.T.A." and it would magically respond with how long till I arrive. Somewhere along the line it broke and for years now it doesn't work... the last time I tried my phone actually brought up the web browser and did a web search. smh.
The first thing I did when they forced gemini was I went to look how to disable it. Why? It override the old voice I chose to read calender events in the morning... in fact it would start reading like normal, then that stupid gemini voice would cut in and be entirely unhelpful.
Oh my gosh, thank you for writing this so that I know I'm not going insane. I keep thinking there's no way things have gotten worse, like maybe I'm miss remembering? But I was pretty sure I wasn't miss remembering
“AI” is a buzzword now thanks to the Vulture Capitalists.
The feature should speak for itself. If your feature is good you don’t need to market the underlying technology.
Like, nobody gives a shit about settings being stored in an SQLite database. They don’t care how it’s stored at all.
When my friend shows me his new phone and how crazy it is he can zoom so far into the moon you can see individual rocks - he does not give a single shit that it uses AI. He just uses the gd camera.
When you use AI to build a feature, the fact that it uses AI should not be on the tin. What it actually does and how good it is at it should be. Saying something uses AI is pointless. No matter how much the vulture class wants it, fetch is never going to happen.
There is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles. Or at most there was a quick reference to "ML" when a feature was announced but it wasn't shoving "ML is doing this THIS" in every UI it could.
Sure we could argue that there were times that ML was likely not really necessary, but it was still largely invisible to the user what the mechanism was.
I think about autocorrect, sentence completion (or just next word recommendation), music recommendations, etc. All of those were clearly ML but the user was not made aware of that at every step of using them and in many cases it being ML was only in technical documents or the original announcement.
Now obviously there are exceptions to this, but it was the exception that shoved ML in your face compared to the current situation around AI.
While I agree that AI is more salient, I feel like there was a ton of press about the "Algorithm" especially around social media and content, which is essentially "ML"
> here is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles.
No, not at all. That was a chief complaint. Grandma doesnt give a fuck about machine learning, why are they advertising it?
> I think about autocorrect, sentence completion (or just next word recommendation), music recommendations, etc. All of those were clearly ML but the user was not made aware of that at every step of using them and in many cases it being ML was only in technical documents or the original announcement.
Right. And that's why this isnt an example of the phenomena. Nowhere did I say machine learning was useless.
This is only true on HN. My parents and siblings and cousins and non-technical friends don't even know what the fuck ML or Machine Learning is ... but they all hate AI because they have seen everything AI gets pushed into now sucks and are tired of the AI slop on Facebook and in their Google searches.
The broad public did catch on. They just know there is some invisible force out there named The Algorithm that acts like some fickle god they must appease in order to do well on the internet. Nobody can explain The Algorithm to you, because it isn't like what we learn in school or write in C, it's weights.
Note that I am NOT arguing ML is useless. It's not useless. I'm saying people made these same criticisms they make against AI: buzz word, implementation detail, often unnecessary.
It's funny to me that people forget this. I agree the AI buzz is more pervasive. But thats a difference in degree and not kind.
The situation with Apple is what really annoys me about this entire situation, they clearly felt pressure because there was article after article about "Apple falling behind" on AI.
And there is some truth to that given that the features we were supposed to get in iOS 26 did not come out. But it also was just that they were not shoving AI into every single thing.
I still have hope that they will be the company that will (mostly) apply AI in a more meaningful way instead of it just being "AI magic" in everything. There were some genuinely useful things shown at WWDC.
Will have to wait and see though. I was disappointed to see them leaning more into the same branding.
It’s because they don’t know the actual benefits yet and are all hoping they either accidentally stumble across it/one of us finds the billion dollar application for them.
For most consumers AI will be a net negative. Already I can tell more and more companies use it in their call centers and support workflows, often just to stonewall customers: they reply very politely and with great attention to detail but will not solve your issue as they don’t have any decision power.
I really don’t look forward to this new world, AI is a powerful and useful too for creators but it will and already is used for all the wrong reasons, apparently even to pick which targets to destroy in war, essentially making life or death decisions in some areas with little to no oversight. And then people here think that any kind of regulation around this tech is useless and unwarranted…
Don’t get me wrong I use AI all the time but I fear it will be the most disruptive technological development in both positive and negative ways that we have ever dealt with.
When we use AI ourselves via tools like chatbots, harnesses etc. we are mostly actively choosing to do so, and have some control. We can always just decide to stop and do the work ourselves if its not working out.
In the call center/situation of companies embedding it in their products, often its not in a way that gives users the choice. They are forcing it onto their users with no other option, or at the very least they are always forced to play along with the LLM until it finally gives up.
Its user hostile since we can't decide to break out of the LLM loop when we want to.
Add on top of that most of these companies are actually forcing the use of the AI related features simply to fulfill someones KPI's/internal metrics.
Well you also have to recognize that call centers are a net negative for every organization, especially as (almost) no one makes (B2C) purchases over the phone anymore. Whenever you call a company you are costing them money. With automation, you cost them less money. If they inconvenience you, all that does is discourage you from calling them more, which, again, leads to even more savings for them.
The incentives are perfectly aligned for all of us to absolutely hate interacting with call centers, especially automated ones.
Well maybe don't run the call center at all, and actually make things fixable yourself without interacting with a human/LLM.
Example: At least here in the US plenty of companies still require calling in to cancel. Include that by default as a user flow/feature (and we're getting better but many utility, gyms and other companies still require calls) and boom, you've gotten rid of probably 50+% of call volume in many places still requiring this.
But of course they want the best of both worlds as you describe. They want to inconvenience the hell out of you for things that are 100% able to be implemented as just regular user flows so they can get people to just drop it while also saving money on these flows with LLM's.
This is only remotely true in the shithole that is US business culture.
In better places, among better people, you run a good call center because it improves your brand value, and helps people, and solves problems, and you started your business to make things for people or fix things for people.
Then some jackoffs on HN say that your country is "Dying" because it isn't minting any trillionaires.
One of the only non-local businesses that continues to be viewed positively (in my circles) in the US is Costco, who managed to align their incentives (mostly) with their customers by generating revenue from membership rather than product margin. I’ll admit that the layout of their stores is a bit anti-consumer, but that’s a minor transgression imo.
Their business model almost makes them more comparable to cooperatives rather than corporations.
I’m with you - I don’t think this is necessarily an issue with economic systems, but with culture. Specifically the culture that the wealthiest Americans have imposed upon the less wealthy.
What call center have you reached where the agent had any decision power? What are you talking about?
Why would anyone need to make a call in such a LLM intermediated scenario? Your llm should talk to their llm. You really yearn for call centers just so the person stonewalling you can be a human paid minimum wage? Call centers are miserable, what satisfaction do you get from wanting humans involved in such a dystopian enterprise?
Statistically, customer service bots save a lot of time that humans spend on the customer service side. A lot of them are gathering basic form information that would take up more labor time.
If you want more humans in customer service then you'll have to pay a lot more for it, one way or the other.
The biggest one that jumps out at me is Amazon replacing their review search box with "Rufus", which searching the entire context of an item on Amazon, including descriptions, reviews, everything. It then wants me to ask it a question instead of doing a boring search for keywords.
If I'm looking at a product and want to search the reviews for the keyword "battery life" and see what real, actual people are experiencing, I can't do that anymore. A search for "battery life" in Rufus always returns some nonsense like "Many customers report good battery life, while others say it's runtime is shorter than expected". I want human experience! I want specifics! Why is everything sanded down to "good or bad"?
The companies that use AI the best will be those for which you don't have to tell someone they're using AI. That will be the sign of it being a quality product.
If you have to scream, shout, and beg your consumers to use your AI product, you're simply doing it wrong.
On the other hand, one of my recent launch posts received comments such as "this is the sort of thing that is now possible with AI!", when I didn't use any AI at all.
I think this is the real issue. Consumers love shiny cool stuff, but they don't like Clippy the paperclip. They like Siri when it helps but they don't like Siri when it impedes them.
What a conundrum! Why oh why are consumers reacting this way?
Oh no. It can't really be because "AI" frequently means "we fire employees to make more money. And by the way, we don't actually care about quality". Right?
I’ve seen a few brands here and there boasting of the quality of the “select Asian suppliers” they moved their manufacturing to. It’s a clever way to preempt criticism that the brand is now no different from any of the competing brands that moved to China or Vietnam.
Is this in things like the clothing industry, where there exists a conversation around fast/cheap/outsourced fashion and has consumer pushback built in? If so, it makes sense they would get ahead of that. I'm not sure all industries bother to make that point/consumers really care.
I guess they can say "Made in China, designed by Apple in California" in the packaging but at least they still take pride in the design. With AI it sounds you are disavowing also the authorship of the design.
Or have you ever seen an advertisement for US/EU tech that said: "Developed and designed by our software experts in the Philippines", or "Call our help line and we transfer your call to India for free!"
If it were outsourced to somewhere "nice", it would surely be mentioned: designed in Italy, built in Germany, hand polished by a Buddhist priest in Japan, etc.
Out-sourcing does still involve humans, to be fair. If the premise is that "humans prefer human output" then outsourcing would still be preferred, even if it is preferred less.
Most consumers don't care, as long as the quality is good. For a long time both audio quality and language skills of those outsourced call centers were really poor.
It’s terrible marketing. Telling someone “the product I’m selling will make you jobless and have no value to society” isn’t very persuasive. Outsourcing was not something promoted to the masses.
Once a negative connotation takes over a word, there's almost no coming back from it. When practically every public implementation of AI is negative, people are going to permanently associate negative thoughts towards it. We saw the saw thing when the prospect of AI came to video game development. People had high hopes that it could really improve things but no, all that was scene was lazy, half baked, terrible implementations of AI in video game development and now the general view of AI in that sphere is automatically hated.
"Why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or services."
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."
I have yet to see AI being successfully onboarded in brands where I feel it actually benefits me.
QuickBooks has annoying suggestions that shift the whole UI and cannot be disabled. Misclicks now happen.
The AI in my robot vacuum is... just a label? I don't want to talk to it. I want it to deterministically clean my stuff.
My TV got an upgrade to Gemini. Why? I don't talk to the TV, and it's in my face. (I'm think about getting a device that can do Plex->Atmos streaming).
Imagine the dotcom boom but most consumers have a negative sentiment towards internet stuff, it's mostly just CEOs measuring their internet dicks against each other.
I’m sure there are some good AI products but the vast majority seem to be garbage. The exception is coding agents and simple web text/image interfaces.
So yeah, as a signal the AI brand is about as bad as it gets. Crypto tier. But just like crypto, the investors want to see that signal regardless of any underlying substance.
The exception is translation. Translation is what transformers were originally developed for. LLMs shine in translation, and creating code is, after all, a translation from natural language into a programming language.
A lot of what current LLMs are good at seems to boil down to translation:
* Translate some prompt into a planning list of individual TODOs
* Treat each TODO as a new translation (e.g. from TODO to code), or call some external tool (lookup something on the internet, static code analysis, database request)
* Translate the result(s) of these TODOs into a final text, or into a new TODO list
To me, this is interesting, because maybe the Homo Sapiens intelligence simply developed as a side effect of communication (translating words into actions).
I think that's where it goes, yes. The ability to model the world internally predates spoken language. We (and other animals) already translate what we _sense_ into that internal model. Language is just another translation; all communication is bidirectional translation, internal modeling/thought is wordless.
Reminiscent of when coding agents fail to fix a bug and keep digging themselves deeper into a hole.
> I understand the problem now, I just need to...
> I was wrong before but the issue is now clear, let me...
> I have complete clarity now! I'm going to...
I've also had a customer support chat bot give me completely wrong information. I could guess what was actually true and knew that there'd very likely be a workaround - involving actual people - to do what I need to do (which turned out correct), but it pissed me off anyway.
Maybe if marketing people stopped using the incredibly generic term "AI", and started actually saying what something is, it might work better. When you say "this app is powered by AI", do you mean Skynet, an LLM, or a basic machine learning system?
What's a "basic machine learning system?" is this a question of the size of the model or the algorithm? Which algorithms are basic? If you've got an ensemble of models that includes multiple transformers not all of which are LLMs as well as CNNs, how do you think the marketing people should express that?
AI categorisation is second nature to us software engineers, it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the architecture for a transformer
and one or two CNNs.
Literally always LLM. AI is now synonym for LLM, regardless of what it meant before. Just like crypto is now synonym for e-currency and does not mean cryptography anymore.
I've worked at a company whose product involved some decently advanced computer vision, marketed as AI (which isn't incorrect).
I've also seen companies that were doing machine learning before the LLM boom, who remarketed their machine-learning-based product as AI (which isn't incorrect).
Yes, but instead of it being correlated with information safety and fewer bugs, it's correlated with bloated, buggy products that barely work or almost work.
I'm looking at AI in a product as a way to tell it what to do without me needing to look up what I want to do... And it usually doesn't do that.
For example:
I wanted to make a pie chart in Excel of 5 cells, so I selected them and told Copilot to make a pie chart. It put a pie chart image in the chat window, and told me where to click to make the pie chart, but didn't actually make the pie chart for me.
Sometimes my phone's camera saves a picture in the wrong orientation, and I don't feel like digging around for where Google put the rotate button today. There's an easily-accessible prompt box, but it can't follow "rotate the image 90 degrees to the left".
---
The thing is, unless you use an app to do a task all the time, often it takes longer to find the button, remember the keystroke, or look it up on Google than it takes to just bang out a prompt. And, if I can tell my IDE to "write a unit test for this class" and get back something useful, why can't I tell Excel to "make a pie chart for these cells" and get back something useful?
Why would you add features you know 70% of your users would hate? The fact that you have to hide them from your users because of this should probably be a sign to reconsider.
I think what a lot of tech people don't understand is how little most people care about technology. People want products that work well. If you can find a solution that serves people's needs then they don't really care about the underlying technology.
For example, apart from my day job, I do IT consulting for small local businesses. I do anything from landing pages to AI integration into their existing processes to make them more efficient at their work. The end result is their customers getting faster and better quality service, and my customers get to focus more on their business instead of administration. They don't really care that it's AI, but they do care about the results.
And I think that's the part many executives are missing. Focus on building great products. If AI is part of it, cool. But unless you're OpenAI or Anthropic, AI is probably not your product.
This reminds me of [Steve Job's response about OpenDoc at a conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o) where he points out that focus on the tech isn't as important as focus on the product. Companies are pitching the technology first and not the product, but customers want the product.
The label is now on ... pretty much everything -- to the point where it's completely meaningless. So, maybe everyone can just stop lazily slapping it on things?
You can already see what's coming, too. At some point in the near future, companies will make a point of offering products without AI (to whatever extent) and start offering the bespoke, organic or Classic (i.e. Mexican Coke) versions and charging even more for them.
To me AI in marketing is a signal that whatever business I'm looking at will pivot when a fad comes along. That is not what I want in any service that I plan to use for a long time.
I was promised 10000 AI scientists curing cancer and solving fusion but all I got was unemployment and short videos of fruit people cheating on their partner.
My laptop has a microsoft copilot key built into it. It is hardware mapped to a hotkey that inputs win+shift+f23, instead of just being the right ctrl key. Why would anyone want this?
Yeah, no shit. As a non-tech person who has tried to use it for non-tech stuff: Having the compulsively-lying, halluciating POS algorithm that everyone thinks is the second coming of Christ burn an obscene amount of non-renewable energy to create said lies while my company wants us to train it to steal out jobs is kinda something I'm not interested in.
How is training my replacement on a plagiarism machine that is actively putting people (including myself) out of the job while destroying the environment (but whose results are still not as good as a human) in any world a good thing?
There is no boost in productivity for non-tech related stuff. If you need to double-check the output, it is de facto not as productive as a human, since you need to effectively do the work twice.
Also, it adds nothing of value where is is being crammed into everything, and just seems to be a cynical techbro PE driven buzzword play.
It's a bit like 25 years ago when people were slapping web on everything to make it seem better.
Part of this is incentivized by investors that want everything they invest in to be an AI thingy so they can feel good about themselves. So, you have a lot of startups optimizing for that. This is not a new thing of course. Every if-else type logic got shamelessly labeled AI at some point even fifteen years ago. I've been in a few places where that happened.
Other than that, I can't see why consumers should care for most things they actually buy and pay for.
But of course they tend to fall in the feature matrix trap where when faced with choice between product A and product B, they tend to go for the one with the most elaborate spec sheet. Even if most of that is just meaningless word soup to them. True for phones, TVs, stereo equipment, cars, etc. Most people really have no clue what they are buying so they just over pay under the assumption that it will cover their needs. AI goes in a long list of meaningless marketing language that companies use to market their products. Most people say they are not sensitive to that, but their purchase choices usually tell a different story. Marketing people know that.
does this mean that 40% of consumers say it's good? or what?
if that is what that means, i would actually say keep improving... since ai is new and there's a lot of mixed feelings about it, it's understandable that sentiment leaks into ai-enabled products.
that being said, there are /a lot/ of ai chatbot product integrations that are actual dogwater and we should not do them. like the stupid amazon integration that is forced upon me that took up like 30% of my screen and straight up just was worthless.
i think the best ai consumer facing workflows you dont actually directly interface with ai via what is expected to be a human interface like chat - it should do processing in the backend, or it supports a human agent.
> Al Ries asserted that a brand is a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of a prospect.
>
> Source: https://heidicohen.com/what-is-branding [2011-08-15]
The keyword - mind. That is, a human being is supposed to stand behind a "brand", who is responsible for it, and is to be trusted for the product, the effort, the experience they offer.
Your quoted text does not back up your claim. It says brands live in the mind of the customer (i.e. the prospect). It doesn't say anything about a brand representing a real human being.
I was at the grocery store a few weeks back browsing the clearance with my girlfriend.
To my amazement I picked up a, grifty “hair regrowth” supplement. Right on the top of the box, they had the text: “AI TECHNOLOGY”
If you want to know what the fuck is happening to this country you just have to understand that we’re at a point where a company finds it even worth slapping an obvious grift on an obvious grift because there’s enough low IQ idiots to buy.
Saying something is "AI" makes sense if it actually uses an AI model. But to appease certain people, you need to disguise or obfuscate that AI is used. I don't think the anti-AI crowd is up in arms about Firefox having a local translation feature, despite that it uses an AI model.
So so so true! I'm developing a product right now and will be using AI for part of it, but AI doesn't mean s**, the feature means something though so just call it by the feature that it is. You don't have to mention AI ever!
Outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber the attitude towards AI has shifted dramatically over the last few months. Folks still think the tech is cool but everyone is fed up with AI slop and all the noise and hype that’s failed to deliver.
The mood has shifted dramatically, but that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone that never leaves tech circles where it’s still all AI all the time.
If our hormonal reward systems are so fried that low-effort staring at a screen has become the most rewarding thing to do with our time, then the content industry has played us like a fiddle.
Understood. Admittedly I'm as guilty as anybody else, but lately I'm trying to take more time away from digital media to spend face-to-face time with people, look at real scenery, and practice physical hobbies.
The consumer-opinion perspective of this survey misses what I think is the main factor in the general public's feelings about AI.
People have a huge capacity to absorb enshittification of everything they consume, from goods /services to culture to politics, if they receive some kind of short term gratification.
But in the back of people's minds, when people hear "AI", is the underlying question: "is it going to take my livelihood?"
IMO that's what motivates the negativity, not some miscalibrated branding.
When you have AI startups running ads like "Why hire humans, our bots work 24/7 and don't WFH or report things to HR" (almost verbatim) .. what does one expect?
The word "turnoff' is an understatement. The rubes try to sell it like the Monorail on the Simpsons. They're pushier than a timeshare. Feels like a scam.
> "Bot fatigue sets in when the internet stops feeling honest"
if there's anything worse than LLM-written text, it's websites that rally against LLMs and AI-use, then blatantly just use AI to do the thing they're against
if you're going to be anti-ai, at least don't use it!!
Half of those submissions are directly contradicting my experience with the AI tools in question. AI slop is real and a problem, but most of the submissions act like everything is slop, and that is false.
My wife, who honestly tries to avoid technology at all costs, was working on her business site and said, "It's almost impossible to find any good stock photos with all the AI slop out there."
AI, among non-tech people means two things: slop and shitty customer service bots.
Of course not. Who cares if something uses AI. I just want it to solve a problem or bring me joy. Why should I give a fuck if it uses AI, the internet, a computer, dead trees, or banging two rocks together.
When you label anything with an electrical current AI, ignore all copyright, then cite AI as cause for layoffs ... what do you expect? It's all vibes. Qwen released "world models" that are video processing models instructed through text. Words have no real meaning anymore.
These comments are hilarious. A bunch of people saying “yes exactly!” and performing utter mental gymnastics in an attempt to convince themselves and everyone else that the only people who aren’t anti-AI are SV tech losers.
The thing is, we are spending more on building out data centers and the infrastructure required to build and run them than the total global gross sales of software and related services so prices will go up, not down.
The AI branding isn't aimed at consumers, it's aimed at investors. What consumers think about it is irrelevant.
This isn't unique to tech, either. In recent years, I've started to notice all the advertising around me increasingly targeting businesses and investors rather than the average person. Feels like we're quickly moving towards a post-consumer society, in which trying to convince the average middle class consumer to buy your product is no longer relevant, because that's simply not where the money is anymore.
Well of course they do. AI has strong association with words and phrases such as "hallucinate", "bad medical advice", "slop", etc. I can understand why a business would want to use it, but it's very seldom a win for the consumer.
Not to detract of any of the other reasons given so far for people disliking 'AI' in the brand messaging, there's the additional "snob factor" that the average consumer will reject (perhaps because it's culturally trained to do so).
To put it simply, the last few decades have been about glorifying the average Simpson. KISS and Marvel movies. Trump-level speech. And now along comes something that is going to take the pain of deep complicated thinking away (what a relief!), but the damn villain not only walks the talk[^1], it also unfortunately talks the talk with complicated words, correct capitalization and (gasp!) em--dashes. What's not to hate about it?
Good thing the businesses and central government no longer require US consumers to function. They can just keep circular trading within themselves. No need to get approval or use by human persons.
If I see AI content online I bounce because I can ask AI myself. All the AI slop has zero benefit to companies doing it to me if they want to target me. But then some people watch tiktoks, so as usual we're in an echo chamber.
The correct marketing and product strategy is to not stick AI in everything. It’s to allow AI to access them. But this is a hard concept to grasp and tough to give up territory.
A good story here is notion: I don’t think they (only) stuck AI features. They made it possible for me to use it from AI. This is meaningfully different because it enables * composability *.
I record my notes in Notion using Apple Watch and summarise them or use them through Claude account which has a plugin to Notion.
Now think about it: employees in notion wont think of this as an amazing feature because it is utterly simple to implement. There’s no limelight or anything. If they had made some fancy AI integration within notion to autocomplete or whatever, the optics are better internally. But outside it is lukewarm to bad.
I wish more companies enable composability instead of bespoke AI integration within their application.
ITs only a matter of time until this somehow breaks down along party lines. My guess is the pro-business context will make republicans pro-ai before long.
This is a thread about how AI signals cheap and low quality. You can't be that surprised that your self-promotion of an AI product garnered a little negative attention...
I didn't promote a product. I was showing that low sports radio shows aren't really any better than easy to make AI podcasts that cover the same topics. Just tried and true host personas (the over reactor, the crank seen it all before, the stats guy, the callers) is just wrapped around the stats of the game. People mention claude in their comments all the time and they aren't flagged as promoting a product. The podcast I linked...ah never mind.
There is a difference between a toaster brand saying their toasting now has AI built in vs Anthropic releasing Mythos.
The toaster brand is just trying to fool people. Something like Mythos is actually what's driving change.
In tech, Microsoft is a big reason for this turnoff. First, they forced Copilot onto Windows users. Second, they decided to market "AI PCs" by forcing AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to put NPUs into their SoCs. But a tiny NPU is no match for frontier LLMs. Therefore, customers are sold on their PCs having something as good as ChatGPT built in but in reality, it's barely powerful enough to fix your grammar.
Everyone around me, including my elderly parents, love using ChatGPT. Go to any coffee shop and you'll see ChatGPT on nearly everyone's laptop. People aren't turned off by OpenAI or Anthropic. They're turned off by everyone else.
A toaster with AI could potentially be useful. I've never had a toaster that can make toast for the whole family - you can do 2 slices but then you have to wait several minutes for it to cool down before making the next otherwise the second batch will not be done. (I have used restaurant toasters that can do this, but they are not for home use)
my toasters have all been the opposite, once you warm it up with the first batch, the next batch actually gets more toasted than the first one, even with the same setting.
even a kalman filter would be overkill for this. Just buy a toaster that isn't terrible, the calibre of hardware needed for this costs $0.02 for a pack of 10 - thats the level of cheapness needed to make a toaster that bad.
Another stat I've heard, but can't cite at the moment, is that only 7% of Americans use ChatGPT daily - I think it is likely a bit older than 2025, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to 10 or 20% now.
Everybody lives in their own bubble, and it can be easy to believe that you're in-touch with the public-at-large. That's why you gotta fact-check this stuff.
That includes a 58% majority of adults under 30.
has roughly doubled since summer 2023.
There are old people who might never use it. That said, my 70 year old parents use it sometimes.
My bubble is working adults, which is likely more represented by the 58% under 30 figure. However, this was a year ago. I'm guessing adoption has accelerated even more in a year. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 50% overall by now and 70-80% of adults under 30.
So these facts don't actually dispel my intuition.
People around me, outside the programmer bubble, hate OpenAI with a passion. It's the symbol of antidemocratic US corporations cuddling with Trump etc, right there with Tesla. And no one outside my tech bubble has ever heard of Anthropic.
This is distinctly different than the dot com bubble were people actually were euphoric about the future unfolding before their eyes.
>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today
This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more.
Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.
I recently took my car to the dealership to get my A/C fixed. On the drive home, I discovered that they'd somehow screwed up my blinkers when they were fixing their A/C. When I called the next day to explain the problem, confirm they knew it was their issue to fix at no cost and to schedule a time to come in I got an AI Assistant. An AI Assistant that has not been trained to expect an issue to be their fault and who kept trying to direct me book on their site or to book a new appointment to get the problem fixed at my cost through her.
The dealerships' decision to hand things over to AI, and to choose to focus that AI on only booking appointments instead of fixing problems is a proverbial F U to me. It's the dealership shifting more work on to me. It's disrespectful and wasteful of my time.
What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest
They don't use their own product, and they don't want their engineers to use their product either. They want velocity, and you can't have velocity if you're bogged down by doing end-to-end testing and finding friction and whatnot.
Its being pounded into their head almost daily (and from all directions) that AI is the future and the more AI the better. Their boss, the industry, other managers, heck probably even their children.
So any big AI initiative they are apart of had succeeded before it even starts!
They know, because in their personal capacity, they hate interacting with AI customer service agents from other companies.
But their bonus depends on driving down costs in their company.
The incentive to replace employees with ai systems?
VS. the inadequacy of ai systems (nondeterministic output, no reference with reality, unknown signal to noise ratio, low effort etc).
They care more about short term cost reduction than long term effects of upsetting customers. Even moreso if there is a lack of significant competition, as is often the case for companies doing this, since customers can't just easily switch to something else.
I think it is not cost reduction. AI is not cheap. I think it is mimetic and FOMO driven, they think the press release packed with em dashes will 10x their stock price or something.
it's cheaper than hiring/training/providing benefits and career growth to real humans, at least for now
I recommend everyone in this thread call OpenAI and talk that support agent. I had some issue and tried to trip it up, spoke naturally and ambiguously, and it actually did a pretty good job.
I feel like this is an example of Sturgeon's Law - almost every thread can be filled with complaints, because most everything is crap.
What's more interesting is the cases where it isn't. Those prove that the idea can be good, but it's obviously a lot more work than "have an LLM answer customer questions".
They don't care. They have metrics to meet and don't care how. Full stop.
Have you seen "Severance"? It's a wonderful show that shows us a sick truth:
Many people are a different person at work. That different person is devoid of morals & ethics. They are machines intent on meeting metric targets. Nothing else, not managers, not employees, base people, just machines hitting targets they didn't decide on.
How could we possibly expect more?
It's like how these automated call handlers that say "Just tell us what you need help with" and then no matter how you phrase the sentence it just doesn't understand what you mean. Great idea in theory, horrendous execution. Bonus points if it automatically disconnects after 3 attempts without finding the right magic word from its dictionary of options.
The answer I always give to "tell us what you need help with" is "representative" or "speak to a human". I despise the automated systems that respond to that with "before we can route you to a human, we need to know what you're calling about". Fortunately, some of those will take the continued statement of "representative" as a sign that they should give up and give you a human to talk to. Not all of them, though.
Have you encountered those voicemail AI customer service representatives? Those can't route you anywhere so you're stuck talking to a robot.
I was just trying to schedule my daughter's dentist appointment and had to spend 10 minutes talking to an AI when I could have found a time that worked in 30 seconds with a human. And at the end of the whole process, she got my daughter's name wrong. It was demoralizing.
Most phone systems will put you through to a human if you pound the 0 enough. The better ones will tell the rep that you did so and they know you are mad as hell and won’t take it anymore and you never have to make the case that they’re going to lose $100,000 NPV because they won’t give you a $500 resolution.
Some of them will also give up and escalate if you do a good enough Rahm Emanuel impression.
Oh fucking hell yes, how much I hate that shit. Bring back the "press 5 for XYZ" phone trees, I never have problems getting the systems to understand what I'm trying to indicate there.
I definitely prefer phone trees the ai agents. Something that has never made sense to me is why we even need most of the phone trees. Could they not just have separate numbers? Billing is X num. CS is Y num. Save the human species minutes for every fucking call.
I realize the decision makers have been prioritizing the opposite. Making calls take as long as possible but I have no idea what is incentivizing them to do that.
They're just filters to see if you actually need help. "They're willing to sit here for 4 minutes listening to prompts and hitting buttons, they must need help" because as we all know, in most cases it doesn't matter which sequence of numbers you press, the same person is going to answer the phone, or same group of people.
I would love to see an app/overlay that displays what each option is during the call. Some system where you don’t have to listen to the whole list of “press x for y”.
I have no idea how to go about implementing such a thing, but it would be cool if someone picked up the idea and ran with it.
Android does this fairly well for me - it will list out the options as they are spoken, and you can click on them directly to type the number. I believe (but haven't seen this recently) it will pre-render the options before they are read if it has knowledge of that phone tree.
But watch out, as our menu options have recently changed!
Good point, but seriously why are the menu options so frequently changing?? (or is that just more BS to delay you further)
Really? The modern ones I’ve run into lately are like 100x better than the old flows. “Press 1 for sales. Press 2 to know our hours. Press 3 if you have a ticket. Press 4 to hear our website address…”.
Of course nothing beats a human with real agency at the company but like, these modern agents could be 100x better than what airlines and internet service providers currently have.
It’s when they see the money they saved that quarter with layoffs. Then the next quarter customer satisfaction is down and they just don’t know why…
The ever dreaded automated phone systems are more tolerable than the AI driven phone systems. The press 1 for... never tried to make you think someone was actually listening to you, yet the AI services are made to come across like you are talking to a human. Don't try to make people think it's a human.
I think the only place so far where I have actually preferred the AI version was when my phone provider switched from a "dumb" chat bot that ostensibly used natural language but rarely parsed anything successfully.
> Don't try to make people think it's a human.
Agreed.
A local pizza place (Tribute Pizza) switched its phone over to an AI assistant that goes out of its way to appear human to such a degree that it inserts random "restaurant bustle" sound effects into the call so it sounds like you're talking to someone standing in a crowded restaurant.
The subterfuge of layering in sound effects to make idiots think they were still talking to a human was a bridge too far and I swore off ever giving my business to them again.
Considering the many embarrassing failures huge fast food chains have had trying to get AI order takers in their drive-throughs I'd be very concerned about an AI at some random local pizza place getting my order accurately
with the keyboard typing and call center chatter... give me a break
This reminds me that I have to write my dentist. They replaced their beep answering machine with an AI chatbot, and the experience is horrible. I just want to say what I want, have it transcribed to text, and then have a human do something about it. It. I don't want to have to slowly explain to a bot who is just going to do the same thing.
Plus, the first time you encounter it, it doesn't identify itself as a bot for a couple sentences. And it's convincing enough that you fall for it. The feeling of being let down and realizing that you were just talking to a chump robot is severe, and is now associated with my dentist's brand.
Same experience calling a dental office recently. The voice on the other side introduced itself by name and had this uncanny valley quality where I wasn't quite 100% sure it was a bot and felt weird asking it outright. Made for an awkward conversation. Once it became clear that I was, in fact, talking to AI, I quickly wrapped it up but came away feeling quite negative about the experience. It's not even that it gave bad responses, but pretending to be a human is a step too far.
Same thing happened to me at my dentist! Infuriating!
I suspect someone is selling these to dentists in particular. Dentists have cash to burn on these kinds of solutions, I guess.
I suspect it's more accurate to say the private equity that bought out dental practices everywhere have the cash to burn. At least for now.
Dental practices are notorious for being badly run: dentists often have great technical skills but are lacking in people skills, business skills, common sense, etc. Seyle in The Stress of Life talks about early research about how many dentists struggle because of this.
Dentists frequently get talked into MLM scams (which they have a lot of money to lose on) or Scientology management training (which they have a lot of money to lose on.)
Given all that many of them might be happier if they work for private equity, and that trend is stronger with more women entering the field. I dunno if women are really worse at running a business but I think they are better at recognizing that they're not good at running a business when they're not.
I really want to agree and I can fill the rage building inside me when I talk to one... but on the flip side I just had a conversation with the Amazon one and it fixed my weird incorrect region/country problem in about 5 minutes. I was filled with rage the entire time, but it fixed my problem.
I've recently come to the thought that the reason why I find AI so snake-oily is because it isn't solving the bottlenecks of the use-cases it is being applied to.
The problem with customer service was never the frontline support agents but rather that these frontline agents are not empowered to solve the problems they encounter. I once had a human agent admit to me I was wrongly charged but they could not refund me on the spot because of protocol. Replace that agent with the smartest model and it still wouldn't have improved that interaction! (Of course, the business saves money if the AI costs a fraction of a human agent's salary.)
I'll take a shot in the dark and bet there was always an obscure/poorly documented way to solve your problem and that the AI could just find it in its playbook faster; it's search after all! It's also not inconceivable to go as far as to wager that a _human agent_ would just have been as effective; maybe the protocol to do it wasn't some obscure procedure for customer support.
----
That said, this is why I'm in disbelief that AI is bringing in as much value to the table as claimed. I realized that in software, it was never shipping the code that was the bottleneck to profit. I could be the mythical 10x productive engineer but all my output is still gonna be gated by things like testing of all sorts, customer acquisition, product development and design. Testing and product dev you could maybe automate but only after putting in considerable legwork yourself.
And of course, shipping 10x more features does not mean you'll get 10x more profit, not even that you'll get 10x more customers.
I have a friend working for an international law firm which has recently made a big push for responsible AI use. (I won't say which firm but the first partner name has to do with croissants and they recently organized an internal AI congress in Spain.) So, they are paying for AI subscriptions but I sincerely wonder if that's adding to their bottom line since their profit is bottlenecked by (a) how much billable hours they can account for and (b) the judicial process which famously moves at a glacial pace.
It's just a pattern I repeatedly notice when I look closer into things. And of course, as we all know, the cost of AI services today is still heavily subsidized by VC money. When that money is gone, I worry we'll be stuck with _expensive_ AI-centric workflows that's not really adding value to the business.
it really depends on if it can do useful actions, and both you and the company can reasonably trust that it will actually do the right thing
IMO it also depends on having a working alternative for when the fuzzy automated system fails to work... except that's the stuff companies want to eliminate in order to (theoretically) save money.
I don't immediately hate talking to an chatbot, my dislike comes from chatbots that sound like humans but can't actually do anything useful. Maybe it just searches the KB and returns an article or maybe it just collects information for the ticket and I still need to wait for a human to reply back. Like I know how to search the KB, I wouldn't be trying to talk to support if I didn't have a real issue. Or it takes forever giving my information to a seemingly real person only to be told to wait, just let me fill out a form and give me a queue ETA. And half the time the real agent can't see the AI messages so I'm stuck repeating myself. Or my question is a very simple one that an AI agent could have the capability of figuring out (is the system down? Unlock my account, etc) but it can't because it's incapable of doing anything other than maybe searching the KB.
It's like you hired the dumbest idiot to answer support phone calls who can't do anything other than cold transferring me to someone that can do stuff. It seriously makes me reconsider doing business with them. What critical expense did they neglect in order to have the funds for an AI idiot? It just feels like corner cutting or something to impress stakeholders that doesn't actually improve product quality or worker efficiency, it's just a vanity project.
If you're not willing to build an AI agent that can actually do real work while also being hardened against exploits (see Instagram), do not spend the money. You are either just going to waste money on the dumbest receptionist money can buy or you are giving away the keys to the kingdom to anyone with a clever prompt.
My main issue with these systems is that they tend to not be able to do anything beyond what I can do myself in whatever self-service portal is available. If I'm calling, it's because I need support beyond what the bot can probably provide, and it just becomes a matter of arguing with the robot to get to a human who can actually solve my problem.
If an AI customer service agent disclosed what capabilities it has that go beyond what I can do by myself, that would be an immediate improvement.
I’ve had to use one of these to book something with a service company. It was horrible. It’s like talking to Pinnochio… there’s nothing there. And it’s trying to sound human and conversational. It’s creepy and annoying.
Just give me a human being or a plain voice menu.
Businesses just don’t want to pay people if they can help it. Some things are inefficient. Get over it.
I was helping an 80+ year old with a phone problem this week. Dealing with the AI CSA was so frustrating. I don't think this lady was ready to burn down data centers that morning, but I think she was looking for a pitchfork by the afternoon.
Part of the problem is that even if you did a good job it doesn't really matter because the rest of the industry isn't, so no user wants to give you a chance
It depends. Sometimes I have really stupid questions and I don't want to read the website, when I know I don't annoy a human when I click "chat" I may use it to ask my stupid question.
But this is a exception most of the time I just try to confuse the AI to get to an actual human faster.
People say jobs with the "human touch" will stay relevant after AGI. And I'm like have you seen customer service? I can't even find the phone number anymore on amazon
Whats implied there is that the "human touch" will become a luxury.
I have a hard time seeing a future where retail doesn't bifurcate even further into ultra low margin, happy-path optimized megastores and concierge-style high touch boutiques. Places like Crutchfield that split the difference nicely seem to be a dying breed.
I immediately skip all youtube ads that are AI generated, and I can easily spot them. Not just that, I am planning to actively avoid those brands that are doing this. A small way to send a message that this form of AI sucks. In addition, I make it a point to compliment humans that assist me in customer support, and ask them to tell their management that they need to hire more humans.
The problem is that your principled opposition to these ads by voting with your wallet does nothing. The advantage to the advertiser is that AI allows them to vomit out ads even more cheaply and to make even more micro-targeted versions of them, and the greater number of suckers sold to more than offsets principled opposers.
The real solution would be the ability to block AI-generated adverts completely in your browser, forcing advertisers to send you non-AI ads if they want your attention.
> The real solution would be the ability to block AI-generated adverts
To speak from a cynical step further along the spectrum (e.g. "aacktually the real real problem is...") I submit that "voting with your eyeballs" is just a weaker form of "voting with your wallet", which is itself a trap [1] that empirically doesn't work and mainly exists to dis-empower the public.
In other words, blocking the adverts would be nice, but unless it's part of an organized boycott it probably won't affect much either.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/
The real solution is to stop using YouTube.
The real solution is blocking all ad tech. I'll show anyone who asks me how to set up an ad blocker in a decent browser.
If I were a manager I would be excited as well. Product quality doesn’t seem to be a metric that is actually correlated with executive bonuses, reducing cost is.
It’s why enshitification is so common. Create a tool that quantifies quality in a usable way as a metric and you change the entire economy.
> even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story.
::2065, in a US Social Studies class::
And that, children, across many industries, along with the unfortunately-timed chatbot craze, then believed to be real AI, is the surprisingly simple origin of Corporate Optimistic Cynical Braindeadism. It’s a bit wordy, but it was LLM-generated before the Big Correction, and nobody bothered to fix it.
That’s because customer support should be the absolute last place that an AI agent is used that might be one of the few places you will need humans in the loop for a while because that’s where people go when everything else doesn’t work
It wasn't obvious from the project outset that everyone would hate it, no matter how well designed it is?
>Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.
I bet you did a bad job with your solution.
I hate AI (or humans following scripts like robots) customer service because they don't actually provide service. They jerk you around in circles, don't understand basic things, can't help, and take forever.
People don't hate customer service when they feel like they have been served.
Guarantee this is a generational split.
The younger demographics will prefer the AI bot to talk to.
Gen Z hates AI… according to https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g... (and others)
If that were true schools wouldn't have a problem with AI.
AI usage is rampant.
I've actually been told by my teacher friends who used to complain about too much AI that their high school students are starting to reverse course here, and are now bullying each other for actual or perceived AI use. It's become cringe.
Assuming that's even remotely true, nerds were bullied for their use of computers.
Now no one uses computers because only loser nerds use computers...
Sure but like.. talking to a chatbot is like the most un-nerdy in spirit thing you can do next to playing football. Nerds are, imo, attracted to esoteric complexity, long bouts of focused, actual, solitude getting to the bottom of the something. it's why they are stereotypically socially misadjusted sometimes.
A "dork" is someone who likes AI a lot I think... They usually revolve more around a product or brand, and focus more on how great it is and everyone should like it. Rather than the "you wouldn't understand leave me alone" of the nerd.
AIUI, most of the AI usage by students is seen by themselves as cheating, and cheating is largely for the tasks that you don't care about. Which means there's likely a strong association with students of generative AI work products with "we don't care about the quality of this stuff."
Rampant use of AI for cheating is not at all incompatible with negative opinions of AI.
> Rampant use of AI for cheating is not at all incompatible with negative opinions of AI.
Possibly. Either way it (for me at least) neatly highlights why AI will succeed.
The students you talk about don't abstain from AI use entirely - they utilise AI for things they consider 'unworthy' of their attention/effort.
That is precisely the market AI will capture first - the tasks and processes that people (in general) have to do but don't really have any passion/interest in doing and for which perfection isn't critical.
And what may surprise many people in this thread (given its flow so far)...there are a whole heap of things that you and I care about, that 10s if not 100s of millions of other people consider 'unworthy' of their attention/effort and for which they will happily make do with a 'sub par' AI experience if it's cheaper, easier, more convenient.
Is this all being astroturfed?
Even researcher are using AI to do their research. It's not just being used for cheating.
I don't thinks so because the ai bot will reliably give you the answers you could already get from the website to begin with and will never solve your problem. If people are calling or opening an interactive chat, this is because all automatized procedures have already failed and you are in a situation not supported by them.
I think people clicking through websites will be viewed the same as people going to the library and reading through books to research.
You just get the information you need way quicker.
Recently I had to make changes to cancel my flight. Luckily the website had an agent and I used it to cancel my flight. Didn't have to wait for an email/chat or worse call.
I even rescheduled my flight using the same website agent.
It's just way more convenient.
I'd tend to say that it is probably because they haven't yet crippled their AI bot with the same dark patterns (trying to make you select insurance, paid selection of seats, additional luggages, rented car at the airport) as they do on the website.
Airlines websites could be so much simpler and quick to use if they weren't designed to be full of traps.
Don't expect that edge to persist indefinitely, they are in the adoption phase.
It becomes a problem when individual users are driving these agents for them, locally through computer use.
The problem is that the agents can not be trusted to do things so at the end of the day you wade through loads of crap and they cant solve your problem because they usually only have the same powers you do.
Great if grandma doesnt know how to use a web form, fucking useless for everyone else.
Yes, it's a generational split.
People in their 60s or older get confused. People in their 40s or 50s tolerate it better. Younger people hate it with a passion and will hate anything that it touches.
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.
>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".
Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.
So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.
I think AI has also become synonymous with slapdash, low effort, probably steals my data
Precisely. "We're doing this with AI" reads as "we don't care enough about this to pay a person to do it."
And frustrating automated voice systems, support chat bots that go in circles, etc.
>> It looks like this isn't something I can help you with. Would you like to be connected to a human who can help?
> Sure!
>> Ok, I'm connecting you to a human now.
[5 minutes later]
> Hello?
>> Hi! What can I help you with?
> Are you a human?
>> No, I'm an AI agent programmed to help you with anything you need. What can I do for you?
> You said you were going to connect me to a human.
>> That isn't something I can do. What can I help you with?
Turns out "connecting to a human" is something it knows about in its training data so it'll hallucinate doing so.
At least your example IDs itself as an AI agent. The ones I've come across hide it but it becomes obvious with responses like "I don't have access to that information" or something a human would never say. I had a dealership give me one of those, so I hung up on it and called a different dealership where I was connected to an actual human. Guess which one got my business...
So AI is resurrecting the microsoft clippy problem
Clippy was just ahead of its time. Sadly for the bots of now, they are only slightly better than Clippy
Example #1, Co-pilot in EVERY corner of Microsoft's software.
>In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked.
Just the other day I was trying to fix someone's laptop and reflexively pressed (what I thought was) the context menu key, only to find no context menu opened, and instead a Copilot window right in the middle of the screen.
> Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more
Most egregiously: VSCode.
No, i absolutely never in my life will want Copilot to summarize anything for me and yet guess what button appeared in the UI and i accidentally clicked on last night....
VSCodium was better on this front last time I tried it, and since Microsoft seems intent on allowing the Extensions to be a wildly insecure free-for-all, I am seeing fewer and fewer reasons to stick with the official version.
My washing machine also has this AI icon. Not a big deal but it makes me roll my eyes everytime I see it.
That's actually a feature that washing machines have had for a while - "generative washing" - it is where the extra odd socks come from.
> extra odd socks
I have the opposite issue, can generative washing recover the lost odd socks somehow?
Common misconception, the socks you think you're losing are being found by other people's washers.
Socks are not getting lost; they are getting compacted to keep the context window small.
My LG one has had smomething like that - a coupkle of years old. Seems quite nifty though - it tumbles the load dry for a while and alledgely uses the patterm of weight shift to determine what kind of load it is - the materials etc - and adjusts the wash accordingly
I'm pissed off that Android took over the power button to activate their AI agent bullshit.
Search your settings for Power Button, Side Button, or whatever. You should be able to change the setting for a long press.
Google, not Android.
I assure you, the Android Open Source Project made no such change.
I've recently switched to grapheneos. I have a high tolerance for shit not working, but its been fine.
i blame microslop for poisoning public perception with copilot. god that was so awful.
Also the product itself is likely to suck.
One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.
I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!
This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
> The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:
> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.
Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.
Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.
It's somewhat fascinating to me that we are so far out in the weeds of stupidity in the modern era that the only things that were predicted accurately have to come from satire about "Nobody would ever be so stupid as to build or create this"
It drives me crazy that after every update the menu icons, like the browser, is in a completely different arbitrary place. And since Tesla doesn't want to allow Carplay I'm forced to use the slightly less than useful mobile web version of my favourite apps.
The touchscreen is the only thing that's kept me from leasing a Tesla the past 8 years.
Not the hitler salute?
Correct
"Nazis are fine, but touchscreens aren't" seems like a weird place to draw the line, but I guess it's good that you have one at all.
And now it's one of two things keeping me from ever doing so in the future
can you blame them? nondeterministic products have resulted in some of the most successful businesses of All Time (tiktok, reels, google search, product recommendations)
> I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
Incidentally, this is why I will never buy a Tesla. I used to want one pretty badly, I thought (and still think tbh) that they are very cool cars. I was even willing to barely tolerate using a touchscreen as the only interface. But to make that work safely, the controls need to be in the same exact place every time so that I can learn to manipulate them without looking at the screen. Moving stuff around willy nilly like Tesla does isn't just annoying, it's actively unsafe. So I'm not buying one and never will, because they have proved I can't trust them to act right.
I think you may be right. I enjoy tech and programming, but hardly any of my friends/family do. And nearly everyone in my inner circle (an admittedly small number of people, considering I'm an extreme introvert) condemns and avoids AI both for the reasons you mentioned and because they refuse to "outsource my brain to AI!"
In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).
I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.
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.
> how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists
Spotify was praised as an alternative to piracy that gave some money to artists at a price that consumers wouldn’t complain too much about.
You don’t have to look at Spotify, though. Look at all of the people who won’t even pay Spotify or Netflix rates for content because they know they can pay $0 to pirate it.
Sorry my friend, but Netflix is not a good product. It has a limited selection and, at least for my account, a lot of commercial ads. I am not pirating but I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
bTW - I stopped watching Netflix.
Netflix was just an example.
> I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
I don’t know what plan you were on, but mine doesn’t have ads.
This kind of proves my point, though: People don’t want to pay for things (including the ad-free level) so they use it to justify piracy as being superior for various reasons.
The selection is still shitty though, even with no ads. Piracy is a superior choice.
Given that Netflix invests heavily in DRM, Piracy is at least the more ethical choice.
> Piracy is a superior choice.
And there it is.
Netflix was just an example. There are other services.
Sorry, my post was not clear. Today piracy is a superior choice. The bedt product Netflix offered me was when they shipped DVDs - their selection was immense (on par with Blockbuster). I could have pirated then (I was going once a year to my home country where DVDs were sold on open air markets) but I did no do that because was too much trouble.
When Netflix started to be online only I tagged along, and it was OK-ish - selection was not that great but but price was not big either and once in a while I would watch a movie. Today ads are very intrusive and the cost for no ads is $20 / month- which is not worth it for me. Compared to this, piracy is clearly a superior choice.
You're arguing an example because it doesn't appeal to you specifically. In other words, you're arguing an example with another example. There's plenty of people who would pay for Netflix and don't because they know they can pirate.
Kids of varying ages that I've spoken to often talk about the environmental impact (mind you, I live in a fairly liberal/left leaning part of the country), among other things.
At the risk of over generalising, I mostly hear a lot of shit talk from younger generations, distrust from millennials, and more excitement and interest from Gen-x-ish and older.
As with many things, there's a certain level of hypocrisy to the shit talking, because teachers are at the schools are complaining to parents about the kid's use of AI, and pointing out that they will automatically fail any writing that seems to be using AI.
AI has been a culturally radioactive PR disaster of truly epic proportions. Aside from whether or not it works, there are so many established catastrophically negative talking points - steals from creators, destroys the environment, is coming for your job - I'm not sure its reputation can be recovered.
if the internet did AI will as well. after all the internet was (and is) full of scams and p*dos, yet people use it the whole day, for everything.
Does it's reputation even matter? Everyone with money is pushing it, heavily. The government is even stepping in to stop any kind of punishment when it's factually shown that they are stealing water. The people will learn to tolerate it whether they like it or not, eventually.
spotify still pays artists. it's just a shitty deal.
most big ai will never compensate anyone
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.
The overall economics are wildly different.
Radio didn't pay much, but it was promotion for the album.
Spotify doesn't pay much, and it _replaces_ the album.
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.
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.
For a lot of artists they’re paid a rounding error. The core question is whether they’re paid enough to make a living from and the answer is no.
I actually don’t think most consumers care about that at all. Consumers loved Napster. They have no problem stealing from artists outright, let alone indirectly.
I think to consumers AI denotes lack of accountability or oversight. They think it might work - but it might not and no one will care.
For example, I’m doing work in standardized test prep and there are tons of new AI products and no one likes it. Consumers feel as if they will get subtle but important things wrong. Most of these companies are now trying to hide that they are using AI generated questions.
There was a lot of outrage over the use of AI-generated images on the Leaving Cert exam in Ireland recently.
outrage lol
What it also hits on for the average person is the uncanny valley. It just feels bad to talk to something mimicrying a person. It feels like talking to an invader at a deep, survival level.
Hard to agree.
No one cares about plagiarism and artists.
I bet lots of people would even be happy that artists get smacked because they see only high profile and rich artists.
Normal people don’t care about AI and are not afraid that it will take their jobs.
They are pissed off because of they are paying customers they expect some level of respect.
AI bots are slap in the face, they ask basic stuff that human operator should infer from the conversation. But you are hit with a dummy that doesn’t solve any of your issues and have to spend time explaining yourself.
Funny part is that’s exactly the same as low income lvl 1 support.
But there is no comparison study. My idea is people are equally pissed off by lvl 1 support that they have to explain stuff in detail and get no real resolution.
Mostly agreed. Practically speaking, phone support reps just follow a flowchart and scripts, so there's effectively no difference between getting an AI or a person (except in those cases where the STT can't make out what you're saying, but that can happen with a person too). But as you've correctly pointed out, it's about respect, and I suspect most people do find it slightly more disrespectful to be forced to talk to an AI instead of another person.
I think its more that AI is generally really badly implemented. It means we get a less qualitative experience, mainly on support, but also writing etc.
Outside of frontier model providers, the vast majority of "AI" branded products/features just don't feel high quality.
AI generated media (art, music, etc) is very repulsive to interact with and so many products feel like they have led with AI solutions to problems that don't exist.
I think that undersells the real problem.
In many cases "AI" signals some sort of betrayal to users, because it shows that the developer CAN drastically change the GUI to implement features it wants to implement, except in practice "AI" isn't a feature that provides tangible benefits to the user.
So you get the feeling of "you could have done this this WHOLE time?" + the fact they didn't do it for you but just to say they are using AI now.
If the developer wanted to please the users, they would instead implement features that users have been demanding for a while. That got a lower priority so that AI that nobody asked for could be implemented.
It only takes one attempt to contact a corporation using their new AI system to scar you, it's that dehumanizing.
And millions of people know exactly what I mean.
> What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job
My unpopular opinion is that many or maybe most people don’t care about this.
They don’t care about where the content came from or if the artists get paid for the work. If they can get something (an answer to their question, some output that finishes their homework, some writing for a work assignment) more easily and with less cost or effort then they want it that way.
Look at piracy for a similar topic: It’s not even a derivative work, it’s just taking straight from the artists while bypassing their payment ask. Yet even on Hacker News every piracy thread fills up with piracy apologia and people saying artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output or that IP rights shouldn’t exist. Many people just don’t care about this stuff even when it’s direct source content taken 1:1 without paying. They definitely don’t care if the tool they’re using to do their homework or write that work email was trained on it.
Downloading artists' songs is not equivalent to people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist. I really don't have a problem with people using AI to generate sounds/images for their own personal enjoyment, but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.
> artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output
The issue is the notion that an artist gets to control what one does with their personal property that isn't the artist's property. No one is saying artists shouldn't get paid. Artists should get paid but setting up a system that surveils everything I hear and see to enforce it is too much.
> Many people just don’t care about this stuff
I agree with this though I don't follow your tie-in to piracy. Most people do not really care about music, and the industry has known this and delivers most music through ad-supported channels and shapes what music production it can to fit this. The ugly truth is that there's probably a lot of people who wouldn't mind listening to AI radio, it's probably coming, and it will be good enough that a sizeable percentage of the population will enjoy it and not care.
The real art has always been outside of the industry though, and that won't change in the AI age.
> people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist.
> but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.
I think there's a fundamental problem with this line of argument, which is that it's naive elitism that's been historically leveraged since the 20th century at minimum. "Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!" with equivalencies for all mediums of digital art.
There's absolutely a reductionism I think that happens with naysaying generative AI, where it's almost a kind of naive agreement with the VC hypetrain. There's a belief that effective usage of AI is just dumping 20 words into a text input and the maximal quality it's capable of gets spit out 5 seconds later. It's the same variety of reductionism as above where ignorance of how wide the domain is precludes the ability to understand where the skill ceiling is (or what is even involved). The idea that this isn't even the tip of the iceberg nets an expectation that "advanced" AI usage extends to random prompt engineering at most.
Problematically, "AI generated" doesn't really say much about the process, intent, or really much of anything beyond a specific computational architecture being involved at some point of the workflow. It could mean they slapped a tweet-length stream of consciousness into a shitty web prompt, or it could mean constructing a complex pipeline, combining processing steps and multiple models like hotpatching synths, using an intuition built upon thousands of hours of learning their tools, using fine-tuning adaptations that they spent even more time building, and carefully analyzing and responding to the end result. In the former case, I don't think there's much artistry involved and it exclusively produces crap. I think it's a massive disservice to the latter however, to suggest it doesn't involve extensive artistry, or that the paradigm of the tools themselves strip the notion of art away.
I understand wholly why the first case gets primacy, but if we're to philosophize about these tools then I think we have to fully account for the second case.
I think the backlash is because there are people claiming "I made this!" for what is about as much involvement as pressing the big meal combo touch button on a fast food ordering kiosk.
Ironically, in the arts there are also some patrons who might feel this way when they commissioned some work. With a big enough purchase price, they think their role as a source of funds is creative.
Now with AI, we're speed running this whole experience among people who normally do not have exposure to this broad continuum of contradictory ideas.
I think there is some nuance between an individual downloading something (and in many countries it is outright legal or at least, alegal) and building billion-dollar companies on it.
We’re talking about the consumers, though. They don’t care how the free or cheap thing arrives. They like that they didn’t have to pay as much.
The same argument is used to justify normal piracy: The consumer thinks they’re stealing from the corporation who distributes it, not the artist.
Young people do not care about plagiarism.
I’m in constant code switch mode.
Among a larger % of my tech friends, AI is cool.
Among my non-tech friends, AI has been uncool.
Among by artist friends, AI has been really uncool for years.
I’m personally in a “water is wet” position.
You'll get to switch less soon as your tech friends get lost in their codebases, loose skills or jobs altogether and pick the side of your artist ones.
Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.
I've talked to doctors, drivers, lawyers etc. and most white collar and many blue collar jobs feel the threat. Which, based on various news, feel justified even if not immediate. Even if its not the same llm per se, but the word "AI" is already tarnished as scum backstabbing negative entity, I literally don't know a single person who sees it these days positively.
> Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.
I mean, I haven't seen AI being used to replace even the most menial jobs. Plenty of companies have been trying to use AI to do things, but embarrassing and costly failures and negative customer response has made progress very slow. How can a lawyer or a doctor be worried about AI replacing them when AI can't even replace the 15 year old worker taking orders at the McDonald's drive thru?
It also signals low effort or subpar quality too. Hey look we slapped gpt on our healthcare app. Is it useful? Not really but the ceo is excited about it
Also translates as “this is going to be enshittified and make your life worse eventually.”
Whatever reasons there were to be excited about tech have been subsumed by the things to be worried about.
Reading the comments in this thread, I think it's difficult for some folks here to accept that many, many people outside their bubble genuinely despise what they're doing, and it's not just a misunderstanding or a matter of branding.
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.
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.
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)
There's an almost total, unprecedented disconnect between C-suite perceptions of AI and user perceptions.
In C-suites AI appears to be some kind of limitless source of goodness and profits, so companies must optimise hard for it, or risk getting left behind.
Everyone else is either "Has some uses if you steer it carefully" or "Hell no."
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.
Because using AI in a product description is a signal to venture capital if private and investors if public, that your stock price deserves to go up.
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.
That sounds a lot like trying to deceive your users.
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"
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!”
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.
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.
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.
Industrial revolution was pretty much disaster for average workers. It took a lot of literal fights till things got better.
Here's one: AI democratizes the ability to produce software, which has mostly been an arcane craft wielded by a priestly class. Now anyone, if they know what they want and it isn't too complex, can talk to AI and get working (if not also janky) software in a very short amount of time. Hopefully this breaks the grip that platforms/large corporations have on personal software and the internet.
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.
It's an incredible search, research, and learning tool, and far better than a search engine. You can get almost anything explained at any level up to undergrad, with the option to ask questions if you don't understand, and with links to references, so you can check that what you're learning is correct.
The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.
But the "research" you're getting from the AI is also low-quality content. And particularly susceptible to the X-Y problem because unless you're already learned in a subject you won't even know how to craft the prompt to get the answer you're looking for.
> The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.
A peculiar way to call VC vultures with neck deep vested interests.
who, to put a finer point on it, presumably stand to benefit from the AI
> having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population.
It has an equally negative connotation to a rather large portion of the tech-savvy population as well.
Isn’t that the case for tech outside of AI as well. My friends that work in tech mostly eschew it when at home. They aren’t connecting their light bulbs to the internet nor buying WiFi enabled fridges.
It seems half of them spend their spare time woodworking or gardening.
also, if you haven't heard someone refer to something as _-slop, you don't get out much
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.
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.
It’s so hard to find usable products when everything is “XYZ for the Agentic era”
Okay… what does that mean?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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
Like every YC company solving problems experienced by, and selling to, other YC companies
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
> 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.
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.
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.
Yell "HELP HELP" into the chatbot and see if it calls 911 for you.
Exactly. It's less important if customers are turned off by it. It's not signaling for consumers, it's signaling for the market.
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?
For me personally, it’s because “AI-powered” products are the most unreliable, buggy and annoying.
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.
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.
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-t...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/11/nx-s1-5678273/trump-epa-clima...
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-help...
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.
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.
AI is not a product, though
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.
the consumers will get what the oligarchs want
I don't understand people claiming all this "the average consumer doesn't like AI" stuff is useful at all, when AI companies are making stratospheric revenue, and ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website.
This is the problem with all of the recent “AI” crap that has been shoved into our devices.
We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face.
Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively making a worse UI and often providing little to no benefit.
Most consumers don’t actually care how their tech works, just that it does and gives them benefits.
The real thing i think people forget is that humans actually value time and effort from other humans. AI is often used by people who want to do neither and that's really what it boils down to.
Ask yourself, would you like to receive a christmas or birthday card with a personalized message or something produced you know was 100% produced by AI bot - even better when it has a hallucination in there.
But that's the rare exception. Almost nobody prefers an artisanal chair over one from IKEA, especially when they see the price tag.
I think most people would in fact prefer an artisanal chair if not for the price, not just "especially" accounting for price. Not a good comparison here though, because most products are not cheaper to the consumer due to AI - only cheaper (in theory) to the provider.
Bingo. They weren't paying for gmail before, and they still aren't paying for it now that it's more annoying than it used to be.
I suspect that, in many cases, AI features actually make a product more expensive for the operator. Imagine how much of doordash's money you could burn by telling its chatbot that the only way for you to figure out where the driver left your order is to create a todo app in React.
Everything about that analogy is wrong.
Everyone would prefer a nicer handmade chair (if not by the price difference).
Chairs are not comparable to OPs cards; writing on a card costs nothing (but intent, which seems to be in low stock these days).
Finally, factoring in the real operating cost, ongoing capital costs, and environmental/social externalities, the AI chair in your example would cost something like 1000x a handmade chair.
That one from IKEA was designed by actual people though. If I had a chair designed by robots it probably wouldn’t be as nice, comfortable and evidently, affordable.
This is so true. My wife loves knitting and frequently gets comments about her items of people asking if they could have her knit something for them. When she tells them that if she tripled the prices of a similar store-bought one, she'd still be making sweatshop wages, they go back to the mass produced version they already have pretty quick.
Everyone prefers an artisanal chair over one from IKEA. The only reason they go for the latter is because that's what they can afford, not because they would get that option if all else were equal.
There is a distinct difference between a chair and a communication (birthday card, letter, email, whatever) about some personal life event
I bet someone said the same thing about an email or an IM vs a handwritten letter at some point in the past but here we are.
Those are not comparable.
One is the method of recording a message, the other is having something else completely draft a message for you.
The importance of a personal message is not just in the visual appearance or delivery, but that there has to be some emotional loading to even put the effort into drafting one.
With AI, it's a stupid prompt to get it to write trite poesy. It's meaningless and empty at its root. It's discourse with a nullity.
Nobody who values the human connections in their lives wants that. No matter what kind of marketing and fine print gets shoved and manipulated into their lives.
Hallmark built a brand on creating generic messages in card.
Perhaps, but you can tell that these cards were made by real people. The art, messages, etc. are all different with varying levels of humor, seriousness, etc. LLMs really seem to converge to specific patterns regardless of the task that are instantly identifiable and low quality. What ends up happening is that the person on the other end thinks “this guy is a moron, he needed a robot to write out a happy birthday card?” Sure getting the hallmark card is mass produced, but they really do hire real artists and writers to make these cards. The robot creates a converged output that is instantly identifiable and has perceived lower quality.
You're supposed to write an additional message inside the card...
They have enough different cards that at least you know effort was put into choosing the card. Also effort was put into buying the card at a store, signing it (often/hopefully with a short message), and sending it.
I don’t really want to defend Hallmark too much but I’d argue they provide a means of low effort personalisation. You choose a design that reflects you and your relationship to the recipient. You write a personal message inside (hopefully). The alternative is creating a card from scratch which is a big step up in creativity and time requirement.
If you don't actually take the time to write something manually inside the card, that's as thoughtless asking an LLM to generate a birthday message to someone.
I've seen multiple examples of software with good working ML solutions toss them aside for generalized AI with worse results. The real shift here is an attempt at the "one input for everything" user interface without understanding there's extremely few use cases where that's actually the best interface for users.
They've regressed for a long time and there's no signal to consumers that "AI" is anything that "fixes" or brings back what was working.
The example I always give is when google maps got speech recognition, I could ask it "Hey google, what's the E.T.A." and it would magically respond with how long till I arrive. Somewhere along the line it broke and for years now it doesn't work... the last time I tried my phone actually brought up the web browser and did a web search. smh.
The first thing I did when they forced gemini was I went to look how to disable it. Why? It override the old voice I chose to read calender events in the morning... in fact it would start reading like normal, then that stupid gemini voice would cut in and be entirely unhelpful.
its all enshitification.
Oh my gosh, thank you for writing this so that I know I'm not going insane. I keep thinking there's no way things have gotten worse, like maybe I'm miss remembering? But I was pretty sure I wasn't miss remembering
> "Hey google, what's the E.T.A."
I just tried this, verbatim, and it works perfectly.
> I ... disable(d) it
I see. So you intentionally broke the feature, now you complain about it being broken.
“AI” is a buzzword now thanks to the Vulture Capitalists.
The feature should speak for itself. If your feature is good you don’t need to market the underlying technology.
Like, nobody gives a shit about settings being stored in an SQLite database. They don’t care how it’s stored at all.
When my friend shows me his new phone and how crazy it is he can zoom so far into the moon you can see individual rocks - he does not give a single shit that it uses AI. He just uses the gd camera.
When you use AI to build a feature, the fact that it uses AI should not be on the tin. What it actually does and how good it is at it should be. Saying something uses AI is pointless. No matter how much the vulture class wants it, fetch is never going to happen.
Uhhh kind of. What you say is definitely true of some products but it's funny, because the EXACT same criticisms were levied against machine learning.
- "ML is such a buzzword. Everyone is trying to shoe-horn it into their product."
- "Why are they putting 'machine learning' in their hero section? Just do the thing well. ML is an implementation detail."
- "You dont even need ML for this. Simple linear regression would be the better choice."
We are so far beyond the pale. This was a valid criticism ~5 years ago and now we remember it as the golden days.
There is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles. Or at most there was a quick reference to "ML" when a feature was announced but it wasn't shoving "ML is doing this THIS" in every UI it could.
Sure we could argue that there were times that ML was likely not really necessary, but it was still largely invisible to the user what the mechanism was.
I think about autocorrect, sentence completion (or just next word recommendation), music recommendations, etc. All of those were clearly ML but the user was not made aware of that at every step of using them and in many cases it being ML was only in technical documents or the original announcement.
Now obviously there are exceptions to this, but it was the exception that shoved ML in your face compared to the current situation around AI.
While I agree that AI is more salient, I feel like there was a ton of press about the "Algorithm" especially around social media and content, which is essentially "ML"
> here is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles.
No, not at all. That was a chief complaint. Grandma doesnt give a fuck about machine learning, why are they advertising it?
> I think about autocorrect, sentence completion (or just next word recommendation), music recommendations, etc. All of those were clearly ML but the user was not made aware of that at every step of using them and in many cases it being ML was only in technical documents or the original announcement.
Right. And that's why this isnt an example of the phenomena. Nowhere did I say machine learning was useless.
This is only true on HN. My parents and siblings and cousins and non-technical friends don't even know what the fuck ML or Machine Learning is ... but they all hate AI because they have seen everything AI gets pushed into now sucks and are tired of the AI slop on Facebook and in their Google searches.
Citation needed. Machine Learning was NOWHERE NEAR as overused as AI in user-facing communication.
The last one is a traditional nerd criticism though, it has been present on HN for the last ~20 years. Kind of ignorable.
The broad public did catch on. They just know there is some invisible force out there named The Algorithm that acts like some fickle god they must appease in order to do well on the internet. Nobody can explain The Algorithm to you, because it isn't like what we learn in school or write in C, it's weights.
You missed my claim:
> Machine Learning was NOWHERE NEAR as overused as AI in user-facing communication.
I never said it was as overused. I said we levied the same criticisms (buzz word, implementation detail, bad fit)
Im surprised people dont remember this. Here are some examples:
- Blind post from 2018 stating machine learning is a buzz word with lots of agreement: https://www.teamblind.com/post/is-machine-learning-bullshit-...
- Tech crunch article from 2020 calling machine learning a buzz word and noting how its advertised prominently: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/25/when-that-ai-company-isnt-...
- Substack article from 2017 challenging tech companies on if they really need ML: https://makecents.substack.com/p/https-medium-com-medhaa-att...
- Article saying 90% of machine learning is just "linear regression in a trench coat" but people are labeling it ML for marketing purposes: https://www.eigenmagic.com/2022/03/22/linear-regression-is-b...
- More blind posts saying ML is overhyped: https://www.teamblind.com/post/is-ml-a-hype-gxtuchm0, https://www.teamblind.com/post/is-machine-learning-overhyped..., https://www.teamblind.com/post/when-will-this-ai-hype-die-8z...
- hackernews thread for article and comments claiming its overhyped, over-applied etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149532
Note that I am NOT arguing ML is useless. It's not useless. I'm saying people made these same criticisms they make against AI: buzz word, implementation detail, often unnecessary.
It's funny to me that people forget this. I agree the AI buzz is more pervasive. But thats a difference in degree and not kind.
Exactly. It was looking as though Apple understood this. But now they gave in and called it Siri AI.
The situation with Apple is what really annoys me about this entire situation, they clearly felt pressure because there was article after article about "Apple falling behind" on AI.
And there is some truth to that given that the features we were supposed to get in iOS 26 did not come out. But it also was just that they were not shoving AI into every single thing.
I still have hope that they will be the company that will (mostly) apply AI in a more meaningful way instead of it just being "AI magic" in everything. There were some genuinely useful things shown at WWDC.
Will have to wait and see though. I was disappointed to see them leaning more into the same branding.
It’s because they don’t know the actual benefits yet and are all hoping they either accidentally stumble across it/one of us finds the billion dollar application for them.
For most consumers AI will be a net negative. Already I can tell more and more companies use it in their call centers and support workflows, often just to stonewall customers: they reply very politely and with great attention to detail but will not solve your issue as they don’t have any decision power.
I really don’t look forward to this new world, AI is a powerful and useful too for creators but it will and already is used for all the wrong reasons, apparently even to pick which targets to destroy in war, essentially making life or death decisions in some areas with little to no oversight. And then people here think that any kind of regulation around this tech is useless and unwarranted…
Don’t get me wrong I use AI all the time but I fear it will be the most disruptive technological development in both positive and negative ways that we have ever dealt with.
The problem is a problem of choice I believe.
When we use AI ourselves via tools like chatbots, harnesses etc. we are mostly actively choosing to do so, and have some control. We can always just decide to stop and do the work ourselves if its not working out.
In the call center/situation of companies embedding it in their products, often its not in a way that gives users the choice. They are forcing it onto their users with no other option, or at the very least they are always forced to play along with the LLM until it finally gives up.
Its user hostile since we can't decide to break out of the LLM loop when we want to.
Add on top of that most of these companies are actually forcing the use of the AI related features simply to fulfill someones KPI's/internal metrics.
Well you also have to recognize that call centers are a net negative for every organization, especially as (almost) no one makes (B2C) purchases over the phone anymore. Whenever you call a company you are costing them money. With automation, you cost them less money. If they inconvenience you, all that does is discourage you from calling them more, which, again, leads to even more savings for them.
The incentives are perfectly aligned for all of us to absolutely hate interacting with call centers, especially automated ones.
Well maybe don't run the call center at all, and actually make things fixable yourself without interacting with a human/LLM.
Example: At least here in the US plenty of companies still require calling in to cancel. Include that by default as a user flow/feature (and we're getting better but many utility, gyms and other companies still require calls) and boom, you've gotten rid of probably 50+% of call volume in many places still requiring this.
But of course they want the best of both worlds as you describe. They want to inconvenience the hell out of you for things that are 100% able to be implemented as just regular user flows so they can get people to just drop it while also saving money on these flows with LLM's.
This is only remotely true in the shithole that is US business culture.
In better places, among better people, you run a good call center because it improves your brand value, and helps people, and solves problems, and you started your business to make things for people or fix things for people.
Then some jackoffs on HN say that your country is "Dying" because it isn't minting any trillionaires.
One of the only non-local businesses that continues to be viewed positively (in my circles) in the US is Costco, who managed to align their incentives (mostly) with their customers by generating revenue from membership rather than product margin. I’ll admit that the layout of their stores is a bit anti-consumer, but that’s a minor transgression imo.
Their business model almost makes them more comparable to cooperatives rather than corporations.
I’m with you - I don’t think this is necessarily an issue with economic systems, but with culture. Specifically the culture that the wealthiest Americans have imposed upon the less wealthy.
The frontier companies are building agents to automate work end to end (i.e. with decision power)
The tech takes a while to diffuse like any other but I think call centers don't have a great outlook
What call center have you reached where the agent had any decision power? What are you talking about?
Why would anyone need to make a call in such a LLM intermediated scenario? Your llm should talk to their llm. You really yearn for call centers just so the person stonewalling you can be a human paid minimum wage? Call centers are miserable, what satisfaction do you get from wanting humans involved in such a dystopian enterprise?
The deciding power they’re talking about is the power to decide to use or not use an LLM.
Statistically, customer service bots save a lot of time that humans spend on the customer service side. A lot of them are gathering basic form information that would take up more labor time. If you want more humans in customer service then you'll have to pay a lot more for it, one way or the other.
AI feels like “quick and cheap at the cost of quality” so I completely get why consumers would dislike it while business people love it.
The biggest one that jumps out at me is Amazon replacing their review search box with "Rufus", which searching the entire context of an item on Amazon, including descriptions, reviews, everything. It then wants me to ask it a question instead of doing a boring search for keywords.
If I'm looking at a product and want to search the reviews for the keyword "battery life" and see what real, actual people are experiencing, I can't do that anymore. A search for "battery life" in Rufus always returns some nonsense like "Many customers report good battery life, while others say it's runtime is shorter than expected". I want human experience! I want specifics! Why is everything sanded down to "good or bad"?
The companies that use AI the best will be those for which you don't have to tell someone they're using AI. That will be the sign of it being a quality product.
If you have to scream, shout, and beg your consumers to use your AI product, you're simply doing it wrong.
On the other hand, one of my recent launch posts received comments such as "this is the sort of thing that is now possible with AI!", when I didn't use any AI at all.
To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg, this is the sort of thing that is now possible with AI. It used to be possible, but it still is, too.
Hand-crafted has always been the gold-standard of high-status. AI content is inherently low-status.
To the extent that AI adds value, it is being captured, rather than going back to the consumer.
I think this is the real issue. Consumers love shiny cool stuff, but they don't like Clippy the paperclip. They like Siri when it helps but they don't like Siri when it impedes them.
What a conundrum! Why oh why are consumers reacting this way?
It's the definition of cutting corners. Using statistical inference to guess at what's right as fast as possible.
+1 I think you've hit the nail on the head here.
Oh no. It can't really be because "AI" frequently means "we fire employees to make more money. And by the way, we don't actually care about quality". Right?
That mentality existed well before AI. See out-sourcing.
Strangely enough, I don't recall any companies advertising to consumers that they outsourced.
I’ve seen a few brands here and there boasting of the quality of the “select Asian suppliers” they moved their manufacturing to. It’s a clever way to preempt criticism that the brand is now no different from any of the competing brands that moved to China or Vietnam.
Is this in things like the clothing industry, where there exists a conversation around fast/cheap/outsourced fashion and has consumer pushback built in? If so, it makes sense they would get ahead of that. I'm not sure all industries bother to make that point/consumers really care.
I don’t know about clothing, but I’ve seen this a lot in the bicycle industry and in the outdoor equipment industry.
I guess they can say "Made in China, designed by Apple in California" in the packaging but at least they still take pride in the design. With AI it sounds you are disavowing also the authorship of the design.
Yes, but everyone kept it as quiet as possible.
Or have you ever seen an advertisement for US/EU tech that said: "Developed and designed by our software experts in the Philippines", or "Call our help line and we transfer your call to India for free!"
If it were outsourced to somewhere "nice", it would surely be mentioned: designed in Italy, built in Germany, hand polished by a Buddhist priest in Japan, etc.
Out-sourcing does still involve humans, to be fair. If the premise is that "humans prefer human output" then outsourcing would still be preferred, even if it is preferred less.
True, but companies seem more likely to publicly brag about their use of AI than about outsourcing their call center to another country.
> That mentality existed well before AI. See out-sourcing.
Consumers love outsourced call centers, don't they?
Most consumers don't care, as long as the quality is good. For a long time both audio quality and language skills of those outsourced call centers were really poor.
Bombs existed before nukes. Is anti-nuke sentiment illegitimate?
Sure! But it's now more convenient when it's written up-front in the company name!
It’s terrible marketing. Telling someone “the product I’m selling will make you jobless and have no value to society” isn’t very persuasive. Outsourcing was not something promoted to the masses.
Never waste a good alreadism!
Once a negative connotation takes over a word, there's almost no coming back from it. When practically every public implementation of AI is negative, people are going to permanently associate negative thoughts towards it. We saw the saw thing when the prospect of AI came to video game development. People had high hopes that it could really improve things but no, all that was scene was lazy, half baked, terrible implementations of AI in video game development and now the general view of AI in that sphere is automatically hated.
"Why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or services."
- Steve Jobs
from https://youtu.be/XbkMcvnNq3g?si=8Y56TFmKHJhlFXoE&t=364
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."
--Steve Jobs
I have yet to see AI being successfully onboarded in brands where I feel it actually benefits me.
QuickBooks has annoying suggestions that shift the whole UI and cannot be disabled. Misclicks now happen.
The AI in my robot vacuum is... just a label? I don't want to talk to it. I want it to deterministically clean my stuff.
My TV got an upgrade to Gemini. Why? I don't talk to the TV, and it's in my face. (I'm think about getting a device that can do Plex->Atmos streaming).
How do you use gemini on your TV? Type questions with the remote, 3 words per hour?
Surprisingly, my remote has a microphone.
Imagine the dotcom boom but most consumers have a negative sentiment towards internet stuff, it's mostly just CEOs measuring their internet dicks against each other.
I’m sure there are some good AI products but the vast majority seem to be garbage. The exception is coding agents and simple web text/image interfaces.
So yeah, as a signal the AI brand is about as bad as it gets. Crypto tier. But just like crypto, the investors want to see that signal regardless of any underlying substance.
The exception is translation. Translation is what transformers were originally developed for. LLMs shine in translation, and creating code is, after all, a translation from natural language into a programming language.
A lot of what current LLMs are good at seems to boil down to translation:
* Translate some prompt into a planning list of individual TODOs
* Treat each TODO as a new translation (e.g. from TODO to code), or call some external tool (lookup something on the internet, static code analysis, database request)
* Translate the result(s) of these TODOs into a final text, or into a new TODO list
To me, this is interesting, because maybe the Homo Sapiens intelligence simply developed as a side effect of communication (translating words into actions).
You could take that a step further and say everything is information, and our brains transform it into reality (Donald Hoffman).
I think that's where it goes, yes. The ability to model the world internally predates spoken language. We (and other animals) already translate what we _sense_ into that internal model. Language is just another translation; all communication is bidirectional translation, internal modeling/thought is wordless.
I had the pleasure of communicating with the AI bot of FedEx (in Germany) today:
Of course nothing was sorted out (several mails and a call to the distribution center did sort things out).Reminiscent of when coding agents fail to fix a bug and keep digging themselves deeper into a hole.
> I understand the problem now, I just need to... > I was wrong before but the issue is now clear, let me... > I have complete clarity now! I'm going to...
I've also had a customer support chat bot give me completely wrong information. I could guess what was actually true and knew that there'd very likely be a workaround - involving actual people - to do what I need to do (which turned out correct), but it pissed me off anyway.
I hate how chatbots call it a day after providing an unhelpful solution
Before calling it a day, this chatbot actually apologized for answering 3 hours too late because there were so many request at the moment.
Maybe if marketing people stopped using the incredibly generic term "AI", and started actually saying what something is, it might work better. When you say "this app is powered by AI", do you mean Skynet, an LLM, or a basic machine learning system?
What's a "basic machine learning system?" is this a question of the size of the model or the algorithm? Which algorithms are basic? If you've got an ensemble of models that includes multiple transformers not all of which are LLMs as well as CNNs, how do you think the marketing people should express that?
AI categorisation is second nature to us software engineers, it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the architecture for a transformer and one or two CNNs.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
Literally always LLM. AI is now synonym for LLM, regardless of what it meant before. Just like crypto is now synonym for e-currency and does not mean cryptography anymore.
People are not confused about these.
No that's not true.
I've worked at a company whose product involved some decently advanced computer vision, marketed as AI (which isn't incorrect).
I've also seen companies that were doing machine learning before the LLM boom, who remarketed their machine-learning-based product as AI (which isn't incorrect).
If you put AI on a project the average consumer will think it’s using ChatGPT or something like that
I mean I agree with you just that the popular perception of that word has changed
Apart from when they're talking about AI generated videos or images, or the marketing people talking about an AI powered rice cooker https://tefalph.com/cooking-appliances/easy-rice-plus-rice-c... or people watching films where an AI takes over
It also means Diffusion in the context of images and videos.
Or anything that used to be called machine learning, in the context of some consumer appliances.
Or sometimes basic image recognition.
AI isn’t actually a description of consumer value. It’s a tool to create that value
Selling an “AI” product is like describing a C++ compiler as a feature to someone buying a video game
Devils Advocate:
Switching from ASM to C for videogames defined the 16 bit and 32 bit eras.
Switching to C++ defined the (roughly) Xbox and PS2, PS3 eras.
"written in rust"
Yes, but instead of it being correlated with information safety and fewer bugs, it's correlated with bloated, buggy products that barely work or almost work.
Turns out people hate the thing they're being told is going to steal their life from them (often with a shit eating grin).
This is what happens when you run dark strategies. They might work for a little bit in small doses, but eventually they bite you in the ass.
I'm looking at AI in a product as a way to tell it what to do without me needing to look up what I want to do... And it usually doesn't do that.
For example:
I wanted to make a pie chart in Excel of 5 cells, so I selected them and told Copilot to make a pie chart. It put a pie chart image in the chat window, and told me where to click to make the pie chart, but didn't actually make the pie chart for me.
Sometimes my phone's camera saves a picture in the wrong orientation, and I don't feel like digging around for where Google put the rotate button today. There's an easily-accessible prompt box, but it can't follow "rotate the image 90 degrees to the left".
---
The thing is, unless you use an app to do a task all the time, often it takes longer to find the button, remember the keystroke, or look it up on Google than it takes to just bang out a prompt. And, if I can tell my IDE to "write a unit test for this class" and get back something useful, why can't I tell Excel to "make a pie chart for these cells" and get back something useful?
We are adding AI features to our product and being very careful to disguise them and make it not “feel” like AI.
Our customer base about 70% can’t stand AI, 20% doesn’t care, and 10% thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world.
Why would you add features you know 70% of your users would hate? The fact that you have to hide them from your users because of this should probably be a sign to reconsider.
I think what a lot of tech people don't understand is how little most people care about technology. People want products that work well. If you can find a solution that serves people's needs then they don't really care about the underlying technology.
For example, apart from my day job, I do IT consulting for small local businesses. I do anything from landing pages to AI integration into their existing processes to make them more efficient at their work. The end result is their customers getting faster and better quality service, and my customers get to focus more on their business instead of administration. They don't really care that it's AI, but they do care about the results.
And I think that's the part many executives are missing. Focus on building great products. If AI is part of it, cool. But unless you're OpenAI or Anthropic, AI is probably not your product.
This reminds me of [Steve Job's response about OpenDoc at a conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o) where he points out that focus on the tech isn't as important as focus on the product. Companies are pitching the technology first and not the product, but customers want the product.
The label is now on ... pretty much everything -- to the point where it's completely meaningless. So, maybe everyone can just stop lazily slapping it on things?
You can already see what's coming, too. At some point in the near future, companies will make a point of offering products without AI (to whatever extent) and start offering the bespoke, organic or Classic (i.e. Mexican Coke) versions and charging even more for them.
I’m surprised it’s just sixty. I don’t think anyone, not the least consumers, wants AI used upstream of themselves.
To me AI in marketing is a signal that whatever business I'm looking at will pivot when a fad comes along. That is not what I want in any service that I plan to use for a long time.
I was promised 10000 AI scientists curing cancer and solving fusion but all I got was unemployment and short videos of fruit people cheating on their partner.
My laptop has a microsoft copilot key built into it. It is hardware mapped to a hotkey that inputs win+shift+f23, instead of just being the right ctrl key. Why would anyone want this?
Consumers are tired of going through a popup slideshow of "Try our new AI features!" they won't use every time their apps update.
Yeah, no shit. As a non-tech person who has tried to use it for non-tech stuff: Having the compulsively-lying, halluciating POS algorithm that everyone thinks is the second coming of Christ burn an obscene amount of non-renewable energy to create said lies while my company wants us to train it to steal out jobs is kinda something I'm not interested in.
How is training my replacement on a plagiarism machine that is actively putting people (including myself) out of the job while destroying the environment (but whose results are still not as good as a human) in any world a good thing?
There is no boost in productivity for non-tech related stuff. If you need to double-check the output, it is de facto not as productive as a human, since you need to effectively do the work twice.
Also, it adds nothing of value where is is being crammed into everything, and just seems to be a cynical techbro PE driven buzzword play.
It's a bit like 25 years ago when people were slapping web on everything to make it seem better.
Part of this is incentivized by investors that want everything they invest in to be an AI thingy so they can feel good about themselves. So, you have a lot of startups optimizing for that. This is not a new thing of course. Every if-else type logic got shamelessly labeled AI at some point even fifteen years ago. I've been in a few places where that happened.
Other than that, I can't see why consumers should care for most things they actually buy and pay for.
But of course they tend to fall in the feature matrix trap where when faced with choice between product A and product B, they tend to go for the one with the most elaborate spec sheet. Even if most of that is just meaningless word soup to them. True for phones, TVs, stereo equipment, cars, etc. Most people really have no clue what they are buying so they just over pay under the assumption that it will cover their needs. AI goes in a long list of meaningless marketing language that companies use to market their products. Most people say they are not sensitive to that, but their purchase choices usually tell a different story. Marketing people know that.
does this mean that 40% of consumers say it's good? or what?
if that is what that means, i would actually say keep improving... since ai is new and there's a lot of mixed feelings about it, it's understandable that sentiment leaks into ai-enabled products.
that being said, there are /a lot/ of ai chatbot product integrations that are actual dogwater and we should not do them. like the stupid amazon integration that is forced upon me that took up like 30% of my screen and straight up just was worthless.
i think the best ai consumer facing workflows you dont actually directly interface with ai via what is expected to be a human interface like chat - it should do processing in the backend, or it supports a human agent.
Your quoted text does not back up your claim. It says brands live in the mind of the customer (i.e. the prospect). It doesn't say anything about a brand representing a real human being.
When you start seeing infomercials on "AI sunglasses", you know AI has jumped the shark, and good riddance!
You mean the Coke flavour co-created by AI wasn't a resounding success with consumers? Who could have possibly known?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/coca-cola-uses-ai-to-create-a-fut...
I agree. What does it matter if it is AI? As long as the product does what it is supposed to do, use of AI is secondary.
It's like the e-everything trend of the 90s.
It's pushing an internal tech detail onto customer faces that only care about a problem being solved.
It's virtue signaling for investors and a usually misguided attempt to look trendy or cool.
Could be worse. It could be Blockchain.
I was at the grocery store a few weeks back browsing the clearance with my girlfriend.
To my amazement I picked up a, grifty “hair regrowth” supplement. Right on the top of the box, they had the text: “AI TECHNOLOGY”
If you want to know what the fuck is happening to this country you just have to understand that we’re at a point where a company finds it even worth slapping an obvious grift on an obvious grift because there’s enough low IQ idiots to buy.
To be fair, it was in clearance.
Good one!
Saying something is "AI" makes sense if it actually uses an AI model. But to appease certain people, you need to disguise or obfuscate that AI is used. I don't think the anti-AI crowd is up in arms about Firefox having a local translation feature, despite that it uses an AI model.
So so so true! I'm developing a product right now and will be using AI for part of it, but AI doesn't mean s**, the feature means something though so just call it by the feature that it is. You don't have to mention AI ever!
What was the demographic of people surveyed? because it would be interesting to know whether this is purely technical people or the average person
Outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber the attitude towards AI has shifted dramatically over the last few months. Folks still think the tech is cool but everyone is fed up with AI slop and all the noise and hype that’s failed to deliver.
The mood has shifted dramatically, but that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone that never leaves tech circles where it’s still all AI all the time.
Big talk from US consumers. The reality is we'll consume those ads and we'll love it. Sir, yes sir!
What am I gonna do, not look at content?
Maybe I missed the /s, but why do we have to spend our time "looking at content" if it's just full of AI slop?
Alternatives are boring, expensive, or require effort.
If our hormonal reward systems are so fried that low-effort staring at a screen has become the most rewarding thing to do with our time, then the content industry has played us like a fiddle.
Look around on a train sometime at what people are doing.
Understood. Admittedly I'm as guilty as anybody else, but lately I'm trying to take more time away from digital media to spend face-to-face time with people, look at real scenery, and practice physical hobbies.
You can't trust consumers with what they say they want in their marketing.
A friend was looking for a new electric razor and sent a link of one that advertised having AI. Phillips Norelco i9000 with AI integration.
Feels like the old iThing or eWare trends of the 00s. New thing, new marketing trend.
Callaway makes a driver called AI smoke.
Because half of 'AI' is just not AI, and the other half is just an LLM chatbot. True applications of AI in your product is still quite useful.
60% of surveyed US customers
Ironic considering the article just reeks of AI.
- AI loves to use "consumers" instead of just saying people or Americans
- "You’ve spent time and budget on it, yet your audience can’t name a single company they think is doing it well. "
- "The small moments that used to make the web worth visiting are disappearing."
- "The brand that builds that recognition first gets to define the standard."
Nearly every sentence has an AI-ism...
I'm shocked it's that low.
Aiaiai.audio looks nervously on
This still means that 40% of consumers aren't turned off at all. That seems promising for AI bulls.
"AI" translates into "we treated your problem as a black box; if it doesn't work we'll fix it later by throwing more data at it!"
I wonder how much of this effect is attributable to:
A) Crap marketing departments slapping AI on everythign
B) Actual organic hate for AI a la booing at graduation ceremony
The consumer-opinion perspective of this survey misses what I think is the main factor in the general public's feelings about AI.
People have a huge capacity to absorb enshittification of everything they consume, from goods /services to culture to politics, if they receive some kind of short term gratification.
But in the back of people's minds, when people hear "AI", is the underlying question: "is it going to take my livelihood?"
IMO that's what motivates the negativity, not some miscalibrated branding.
I mean.. only 60%?
When you have AI startups running ads like "Why hire humans, our bots work 24/7 and don't WFH or report things to HR" (almost verbatim) .. what does one expect?
The word "turnoff' is an understatement. The rubes try to sell it like the Monorail on the Simpsons. They're pushier than a timeshare. Feels like a scam.
>like the Monorail on the Simpsons
That episode was based on the musical The Music Man, FWIW
> "Bot fatigue sets in when the internet stops feeling honest"
if there's anything worse than LLM-written text, it's websites that rally against LLMs and AI-use, then blatantly just use AI to do the thing they're against
if you're going to be anti-ai, at least don't use it!!
Surprise - water is wet.
Yet a third or so of HN submissions are about AI BS. Just another confirmation techdorks are out of this world.
Half of those submissions are directly contradicting my experience with the AI tools in question. AI slop is real and a problem, but most of the submissions act like everything is slop, and that is false.
They aren't delusional per se, just follow the money and incentives and it makes some sense.
Obligatory Stephen Collins:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2025/nov/07...
My wife, who honestly tries to avoid technology at all costs, was working on her business site and said, "It's almost impossible to find any good stock photos with all the AI slop out there."
AI, among non-tech people means two things: slop and shitty customer service bots.
Sir, this is a Wendys. I just want my burger
Of course not. Who cares if something uses AI. I just want it to solve a problem or bring me joy. Why should I give a fuck if it uses AI, the internet, a computer, dead trees, or banging two rocks together.
When you label anything with an electrical current AI, ignore all copyright, then cite AI as cause for layoffs ... what do you expect? It's all vibes. Qwen released "world models" that are video processing models instructed through text. Words have no real meaning anymore.
To me, “AI” in their branding means data mining, collection and privacy violation.
These comments are hilarious. A bunch of people saying “yes exactly!” and performing utter mental gymnastics in an attempt to convince themselves and everyone else that the only people who aren’t anti-AI are SV tech losers.
Just clearly explain how you are translating all the AI "value" into a reduced price for me - consumer, and it will be welcome.
E.g. Spotify is using AI extensively, consequently I expect them to reduce the price very soon. Maybe like a 50% cut.
You meant the price 50% increase because <insert any valid reason | RAM is expensive>?
The thing is, we are spending more on building out data centers and the infrastructure required to build and run them than the total global gross sales of software and related services so prices will go up, not down.
Thank you for a great laugh this morning!
Hey I mean AI is supposed to make us 10x more productive, so the price of things should also go down 10x right?
...right?
right lmao. delusional
We live in AI Era. This is a new industrial revolution.
They just let any ~70 IQ idiot in this site now.
The AI branding isn't aimed at consumers, it's aimed at investors. What consumers think about it is irrelevant.
This isn't unique to tech, either. In recent years, I've started to notice all the advertising around me increasingly targeting businesses and investors rather than the average person. Feels like we're quickly moving towards a post-consumer society, in which trying to convince the average middle class consumer to buy your product is no longer relevant, because that's simply not where the money is anymore.
Well of course they do. AI has strong association with words and phrases such as "hallucinate", "bad medical advice", "slop", etc. I can understand why a business would want to use it, but it's very seldom a win for the consumer.
Hell yeah
I honestly thought it would be closer to 60.0031073814%
What happens when VCs, governments and tech companies drive demand for a genuinely game changing technology beyond consumer's appetite for it?
Not really a surprise, AI is obnoxious and useless in the majority of context, and yet we're forced to deal with it.
Not to detract of any of the other reasons given so far for people disliking 'AI' in the brand messaging, there's the additional "snob factor" that the average consumer will reject (perhaps because it's culturally trained to do so).
To put it simply, the last few decades have been about glorifying the average Simpson. KISS and Marvel movies. Trump-level speech. And now along comes something that is going to take the pain of deep complicated thinking away (what a relief!), but the damn villain not only walks the talk[^1], it also unfortunately talks the talk with complicated words, correct capitalization and (gasp!) em--dashes. What's not to hate about it?
[^1]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192777/walk-the-...
Not surprising given that 95+% of the time it's total bullshit.
Good thing the businesses and central government no longer require US consumers to function. They can just keep circular trading within themselves. No need to get approval or use by human persons.
Not yet 100%?
Skynet slop is still finding confused humans here. Will they end up loving and embracing their new AI masters?
What I want to know is who the fuck is the 30% saying the internet is not less human than it was 10 years ago
still they use AI.
If I see AI content online I bounce because I can ask AI myself. All the AI slop has zero benefit to companies doing it to me if they want to target me. But then some people watch tiktoks, so as usual we're in an echo chamber.
The correct marketing and product strategy is to not stick AI in everything. It’s to allow AI to access them. But this is a hard concept to grasp and tough to give up territory.
A good story here is notion: I don’t think they (only) stuck AI features. They made it possible for me to use it from AI. This is meaningfully different because it enables * composability *.
I record my notes in Notion using Apple Watch and summarise them or use them through Claude account which has a plugin to Notion.
Now think about it: employees in notion wont think of this as an amazing feature because it is utterly simple to implement. There’s no limelight or anything. If they had made some fancy AI integration within notion to autocomplete or whatever, the optics are better internally. But outside it is lukewarm to bad.
I wish more companies enable composability instead of bespoke AI integration within their application.
still they use AI
Then why did openAI make gazillions in revenue
It's easy to make an enormous amount of revenue selling $50 bills for $10.
There's a big chance that you work at a company that does exactly that
Do you have access to their financials?
For the purposes of this discussion, we all do: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
ITs only a matter of time until this somehow breaks down along party lines. My guess is the pro-business context will make republicans pro-ai before long.
Evidently I read the room wrong. Sorry for linking to my little project. Good day to you all!
This comment is irrelevant ad spam
I mean, not really? I did make it. Thought it would be interesting. Is that I mentioned the name of a company I used?
This is a thread about how AI signals cheap and low quality. You can't be that surprised that your self-promotion of an AI product garnered a little negative attention...
I didn't promote a product. I was showing that low sports radio shows aren't really any better than easy to make AI podcasts that cover the same topics. Just tried and true host personas (the over reactor, the crank seen it all before, the stats guy, the callers) is just wrapped around the stats of the game. People mention claude in their comments all the time and they aren't flagged as promoting a product. The podcast I linked...ah never mind.
There is a difference between a toaster brand saying their toasting now has AI built in vs Anthropic releasing Mythos.
The toaster brand is just trying to fool people. Something like Mythos is actually what's driving change.
In tech, Microsoft is a big reason for this turnoff. First, they forced Copilot onto Windows users. Second, they decided to market "AI PCs" by forcing AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to put NPUs into their SoCs. But a tiny NPU is no match for frontier LLMs. Therefore, customers are sold on their PCs having something as good as ChatGPT built in but in reality, it's barely powerful enough to fix your grammar.
Everyone around me, including my elderly parents, love using ChatGPT. Go to any coffee shop and you'll see ChatGPT on nearly everyone's laptop. People aren't turned off by OpenAI or Anthropic. They're turned off by everyone else.
More people see/are aware of the toaster than Mythos - those pointless integrations are (I suspect) what's driving sentiment.
That's my feeling too - that and Microsoft Windows being one of the most egregious examples of forced AI features.
I wouldn't let these toaster companies and Microsoft distract from the actual progress in SOTA AI.
A toaster with AI could potentially be useful. I've never had a toaster that can make toast for the whole family - you can do 2 slices but then you have to wait several minutes for it to cool down before making the next otherwise the second batch will not be done. (I have used restaurant toasters that can do this, but they are not for home use)
You wouldn't need AI for this; deterministic programming would be enough (and scads cheaper).
One would think, but...
I have a Sage toaster (Brevile in some markets) which does exactly this, even has a progress bar that counts down when your toast will popup.
my toasters have all been the opposite, once you warm it up with the first batch, the next batch actually gets more toasted than the first one, even with the same setting.
even a kalman filter would be overkill for this. Just buy a toaster that isn't terrible, the calibre of hardware needed for this costs $0.02 for a pack of 10 - thats the level of cheapness needed to make a toaster that bad.
Boring cheap old school toasters can make as many toasts as you want. You dont cool them before making toasts, you warm them up and then do toasts.
Umm my toaster doesn’t have this problem and it’s not AI …
why does this happen to you?
Nah, Mythos are Fable primary purpose was marketing. And the fables about their danger were indeed lies.
Nah, Anthropic is the leading AI company.
A toaster company saying their product now has AI is actually turning people off.
They're different, but average people dislike both of them.
The average person uses ChatGPT daily. This average person hates how their toaster, washing machine, pencil, eraser now all have "AI capabilities".
These stats are from last year, but in 2025, two-thirds of adult Americans had never used ChatGPT: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-...
Another stat I've heard, but can't cite at the moment, is that only 7% of Americans use ChatGPT daily - I think it is likely a bit older than 2025, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to 10 or 20% now.
Everybody lives in their own bubble, and it can be easy to believe that you're in-touch with the public-at-large. That's why you gotta fact-check this stuff.
My bubble is working adults, which is likely more represented by the 58% under 30 figure. However, this was a year ago. I'm guessing adoption has accelerated even more in a year. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 50% overall by now and 70-80% of adults under 30.
So these facts don't actually dispel my intuition.
People around me, outside the programmer bubble, hate OpenAI with a passion. It's the symbol of antidemocratic US corporations cuddling with Trump etc, right there with Tesla. And no one outside my tech bubble has ever heard of Anthropic.
This is distinctly different than the dot com bubble were people actually were euphoric about the future unfolding before their eyes.