Study: Consumers Actively Turned Off by AI
futurism.com
futurism.com
So I told myself, why don't I add AI stuff on it like an AI assistant as a primary way of interaction? Everyone loves AI, it's the future!
Then the app retention tanked, as well as the install numbers and no purchase was made after that. People didn't even bother with leaving bad reviews.
Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it.
Like the artificial sweeteners maybe?
"0 calories and the same taste with the sugar? Why would anybody ever use sugar again, right? Lets short the sugar cane and corn fields and put all our money into artificial sweeteners production equipment and chemicals"
People don't generally like or dislike the combustion engine. They like the ability to get from place to place faster.
I don't need or want that from most applications, especially a photo viewer.
It almost always does but only because it is offered this way, it is not a hard technical requirement. There is nothing that would prevent offering a standalone version running locally for customers with their hardware powerful enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
Again, you’ve gotta remember that originally, playing chess was considered an unfathomable expression of machine thinking. Now it’s a problem trivially solved in CS112 class.
It’s a lot less magic when you see behind the curtain.
Also, back in 2014, it wasn't "just" facial recognition. It was the dawn of the new age of Deep Learning, bringing capabilities that had never existed before.
Is that even considered AI by the hype/marketing machine? It's been around longer than these new language models.
Maybe I'm naive, but it doesn't feel like we're done building the boring stuff yet.
This isn't that strange. There have been a number of things that people have tried to push upon consumers over the last few decades that just haven't landed. Notable examples: 3d TVs, metaverses.
People don’t care about it.
They just want to do whatever it was they wanted to do. It doesn’t matter wether the tool uses hardcoded empirical heuristics, a hand-crafted statistical model, AI, or leprechauns.
Since non-techies are often the people being displaced in this scenario, it doesn't sit well with them when AI shows up in a product they like.
(For what it's worth, I mostly agree with this sentiment.)
At the moment, it’s there for all to see, be it as a chatbot or whatever - but the real applications will be under the hood, not directly interacting with the consumer, doing everything from market microsegmentation to tailored recommendations to diagnostics, credit scoring, criminal profiling, fraud detection, and all of the things that currently rely on sub-optimal human-crafted algorithms or even hand-cranking.
So all in all, what consumers think of AI is almost neither here nor there, as they are not the primary market - business and government are.
wut. the first real deployments we've seen of LLMs are chatbots, esp. those aimed at consumers. hence all of the "sell me a Chevy for $1" memes.
> At the moment, it’s there for all to see, be it as a chatbot or whatever - but the real applications will be under the hood, not directly interacting with the consumer, doing everything from market microsegmentation to tailored recommendations to diagnostics, credit scoring, criminal profiling, fraud detection, and all of the things that currently rely on sub-optimal human-crafted algorithms or even hand-cranking.
That's already a thing, and is what FB and GOOG (or banks like Ant Financial, etc.) have been making money off of for years.
Reality is difficult, AI is difficult, statistics is difficult, everything is difficult. Accidental bias is almost inevitable no matter what, and that's one of the things GDPR is there for, to make sure errors can be fixed.
I think it would have been fun to require companies using AI to prove/show exactly why it makes a determination or decision, upon request, if it's being used to make decisions where we say that such biases should not be perpetuated.
That this is burdensome or not yet possible with current LLM limitations is a problem to solve (or "tough shit") for the companies creating or using this technology; a necessary reckoning that they should have been forced to face from the onset.
>"0 calories and the same taste with the sugar? Why would anybody ever use sugar again, right? Lets short the sugar cane and corn fields and put all our money into artificial sweeteners production equipment and chemicals"
No one ever thought this because low calorie sweeteners taste different than refined sugar. Even cane sugar tastes different than high fructose corn syrup. Also, they are all chemicals. Everything is. Stevia is even extracted from a plant, just like cane sugar or corn syrup.
I don't know much about sweeteners, for me its this thing that you can use instead of sugar if you are concerned about calories.
- Synthesized or highly processed versions of or replacements for a normally natural or well established substance; often for the purpose of cost. E.g. high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, rayon, chrome tanned leather, etc.
- Synthesized or highly processed substances that promise to provide the advantages of a natural or well established substance but without any of the drawbacks. E.g. sweeteners without calories, waterproofing sprays that promise breathability, anti-stick coatings that don't require the care of cast iron, replacing metal with light weight plastics, etc.
For me it tends to come down to two rules of thumb that my life experience has given me:
- Highly processed products (particularly food) tend to be unhealthy.
- There is no free lunch. If some new material promises to eliminate the drawbacks of an existing material, then it probably has different drawbacks that you don't know about yet.
This is just a heuristic, and honestly barely that. It's a belief.
Often there really is free lunch, and that's just progress. Sometimes I think people like to pretend otherwise because it's comforting to deny yourself of convenience.
Aspartame really is zero calories. And it really is safe. Yes, much safer than sugar. No, it doesn't magically make you gain weight. No, it doesn't cause cancer (feeding rats 500 coke bottles worth of aspartame doesn't count!). Yes, it's less carcinogenic than red meat.
From a health standpoint it's better in every single way. Of course taste is another thing all together, and subjective. Point being, yes things CAN just be better.
I eat no more than I otherwise would, and I avoid the spike in blood glucose.
I see a lot of negative claims around low calorie sweeteners, but no proof.
However, I see irrefutable proof of negative effects of sucrose and glucose and fructose most times I am in public, and in the diabetes and obesity statistics.
And I also have read credibly reports about the sugar industry corrupted research to avoid being in the crosshairs. As a result, I would not put it past them to try to vilify low calorie sweeteners either.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Obviously, excess low calorie sweeteners is bad, just like everything else in excess. But the question is, is a low calorie sweetener soda nutritionally better than a sugar soda, or low calorie sweetener candy/popsicle/etc better than the sugar alternative.
So far, I would say the answer is an obvious yes, given what we know about the effects of excess simple carbohydrate consumption.
Listen, you can't just make things up. Just because you feel as though something is too good to be true doesn't mean it actually is.
This is like those people who think Ozempic makes your eyes melt and stuff.
The problem is in capitalistic society "pain is gain" is ingrained since you left the womb. People often have trouble conceptualizing that you can get good results without suffering. People actually ENJOY the suffering because they think it directly translates into good stuff for them and their life.
It's not a healthy, or rationale, way to operate. Ensuring your own misery out of a desperate need to prove yourself and your work ethic is just self-destructive behavior. Sorry to be the one to tell you.
2. Aspartame is safe and there's not a scientist on Earth who claims otherwise.
3. While we may not know NEW stuff, we do know old stuff. Sugar quite literally kills people. An alternative could, AND DOES, save lives.
Maybe the definition is more of a regional thing. Or maybe it's just more BS. In any case I don't think it's remotely consistent or concrete.
I think everyone is tired of conversing with a chatbot over text by now. But there are ways of integrating AI without making the primary interactions a pain. I'm also a bit puzzled by why people think it's a good idea in the first place
Using a chatbox as a way to do primary interactions? Nope. But use that same AI to quickly summarize reviews for a product into a digestible format that I can easy glance at, or ignore? That last one actually saves me time, and doesn't harm my user experience, so why not?
They seem interesting on a surface level, because it feels like they should be able to help with whatever issue you have, and the demos make it look as if they do, but in reality, they almost never do anything. They just pretend to be a human who has the ability to actually do something.
When Microsoft showed Windows Copilot, what they showed made it feel like you could do things like tell it to "create a new user account with the name John and the password 285uoa29tu and put the picture of a dandelion as the profile picture," but you can't. It can't really do anything, other than give you (often misleading) advice on how you can do things yourself.
People have learned that. They have learned that these chat LLMs are just a facade used to waste their time, a simulacrum not of a human being, but of the outward appearance of a human being. It's another hurdle companies put in place for people to jump across before they can talk to an actual person who has the actual ability to do something for them.
So when people see "AI", they don't see "helpful tool," they see "an obstacle I have to get rid of to actually get anything done."
Who would want to pay for that?
The interaction part is cool at first until your curiosity about the tech itself vanishes. The current AI tech has some very useful use cases and its here to stay but its not replacing human interaction or the Human-Computer interface as I previously believed.
The AI pin, Rabbit and who knows who else failed in attempting to replace human interactions or screen UI with speech or text.
Chatbots look so deceivingly capable but they are completely useless when it comes holding authority and trust.
Every real human will always provide you with accurate information best to their knowledge and when they fail on it(sometimes in bad faith) its considered a big deal and can lead to anything from being angry with to not trusting that person ever again(therefore ignoring that person when possible) and in some cases imprisonment of the person.
AI lying is too cheap to warrant a human interaction. It's pure waste of time when it comes to doing anything consequential.
Honestly, what's the point of even considering implementing it if the only interaction will be "I want to talk to a human"?
You want to give them more plausible deniability in lying to you about reviews?
I’m surprised to learn that so many product makers are hyped about AI. I just assumed that everyone is doing it because they’re being forced to by the marketing department.
Of course there are some good uses of it, mostly on the pattern recognition side, but on the generative side, that type of use seems best confined to their own silos and not incorporated into every product.
My non-tech friends, particularly the more creative ones hate AI and will actively avoid it. They see a way for rich tech bros to put real people out of jobs. They see ahead of them an internet drowning in AI shit (on an internet already drowning in non-AI shit), further enshittifying their day to day interactions. And they see yet another ludicrous hype cycle.
My challenge to AI-using folks is the same as it was to blockchain people - make a product with compelling, amazing features. Don't mention AI, just sell it on how awesome it is and how amazing the capabilities are. Use AI/ML under the covers to achieve that awesomeness without trying to ride the hype wave. Then you'll have achieved something.
The difference is, of course, that I imagine that AI will (and to some extent already does) deliver on that...
When I see AI assistance as a travel feature I assume it is not only going to be useless, but actively disruptive to my experience.
Yup.
Branding the mistakes LLM's get as hallucinations was sort of brilliant in my opinion, it was a good way to disguise the fact that LLM's are mostly just really lucky. In my anecdotal experience it hasn't worked out too well though, so maybe it wasn't that brilliant? Anyway, parts of how the AI impacts our business (solar energy + investment banking) has been through things like how Microsoft Teams was supposed to be capable of transcripting meetings with AI. Now, we're an international organisation where English is at best the second language for people, and usually the third, so this probably has an impact on it, but it's so bad. I know I'm not personally the clearest speaker, especially if I'm bored, but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously bad that they often become the foundation for the weekly friday meme in IT. Which may be innocent enough, but it hasn't been very confidence building in the higher ups who thought they wouldn't have to have someone write a summary for their meetings, and in typical top brass style didn't read the transcripts until there was some contract issue.
This along with how often AI "hallucinates" has meant that our top decision makers have decided to stop any AI within the Microsoft platform. Well every thing except the thing that makes power point presentations pretty. So our operations staff has had to roll back co-pilot for every non-IT employee. I don't necessarily agree with this myself, I use GPT quite a lot and while github co-pilot might "just" be fancy auto-complete it's still increased my productivity quite a lot as well as lowering my mental load of dealing with most snippets. That isn't how the rest of the organisation sees it though, they see the mistakes AI makes on areas where no-mistakes are allowed, and they consider it untrustworthy. The whole Microsoft debacle (I used chatGPT to tell me how to write "debaclable") where they wanted to screenshot everything all the time really sunk trust with our decision makers.
My experience on AI transcripts is different: I use auto (AI) generated captions on YouTube for every video and while there sure are some mistakes with especially names and specialized words, in general it is highly understandable. So much so that that I miss the auto generated captions when they're not available.
Even if real captions are available, on occasion I have to swap out from the human made captions to the auto generated AI captions, because believe it or not in some cases the AI generated captions are actually better with less mistakes! I find that rather impressive from the AIs side.
They improve significantly with microphone quality. I have a professional voice recording setup I use with Teams and the transcripts are usually around 90% accurate. A tool like AWS transcribe tends to get 95% on my voice work.
I'd be interested to see real studies into consumer satisfaction with AI features in existing products. My gut feeling is that people don't like (visible) AI in things they use, but that's biased by me reading online reporting about the failings of these features, I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them.
But sure, it would be spiffy if Siri was more capable, as long as it didn’t become susceptible to injection attacks from my photo album in the process…
I asked the exact same question to see what kind of response it would give, and it said that it couldn't answer because weather does not affect star gazing. Really?
I took a screencap, because this was such an epic example of why companies should actually test things before giving public access to them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39954719
We don't have much experience building automated systems that are non-deterministic. Normally, in computer engineering, if we couldn't predict the results of an operation, we'd consider that operation buggy, broken or at best, flaky. Building consumer user interfaces for black box magic is a whole new ballgame.
Our brains evolved to turn chaos into patterns that help us survive. Determinism is good from that point of view and nondeterministic behaviour is discarded as useless. Nature in general operates in a deterministic way, a banana tree doesn't randomly produce kittens. AI and LLMs in particular are nothing but misinformation and IP appropriation systems. No wonder people reject them.
- the system could theoretically trace the inputs, but then IP lawyers would eat company alive; pretending the corpus isn't pirated, so it can be cheap.
- the system could verify and re-check, but that would require a massive compute increase; spouting bullshit, so it can be cheap
- indeed a lot of answers around here go with "let's waste money by throwing it at the system until a human likes the result" - not cheap, but profitable for the provider
I suspect that's how the model makers test it as well, just fling crap at the wall and see which wall lets the most crap slide off of it (but never all of it)
However, to do so, you have to already break copyright law by feeding it copyrighted lyrics.
I did their experiment, but instead of "Go, Johnny, Go, Go Go!" I put in lyrics like "Run, Forrest, Run, Run, Run" (a Gump reference) and described the music style accordingly.
It came out exactly like you'd expect. And the case is demonstrating a mirage where if you steal the song's actual lyrics, describe the style, you'll get something akin to what they might have written... except that there's no way to prove then that the model has even heard that original song before, because you gave it the lyrics and the style, and the rest is clearly bound to be similar as a result.
More than not AI is used as an excuse for the feature to be bad.
Funny to see that come up again, but in a different context.
AI isn’t some behind the scenes technology (any more). And companies with their “AI” gimmick often highlight it with a star or something. People can chat with these things as easily as doing a Google search.
mmm... I guess....
I mean, a feature that is not 'obviously AI' is just a feature; even if you normalized it against 'normal' features with no AI as part of them, surely the deviance from random noise would be negligible?
In a double blind test, you would have three cohorts; control, placebo and treatment (ie. AI).
Since the placebo and treatment groups would receive the same feature with or without AI, you'd be looking at absolutely nothing meaningful in the data you collect.
> I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them.
How can users POSSIBLY have a positive / negative / ANY KIND of meaningful response to a feature based on the unknown backend implementation?
If you put a chatGPT interface on your product and don't put an AI label on it, I guess most people, not being completely stupid, will not meaningfully distinguish between it and the equivalent feature with "Artificial Intelligence" painted on the side. An AI chat bot is an AI chat bot. You're not fooling anyone by calling it an 'intelligent assistant' instead of 'chatGPT'. :P
I mean, I'm just guessing, you could study it. ...but, I guess it's probably not worth bothering.
It's probably more likely the take-away here is: Make your product amazing; if it uses AI, hide that fact that it uses AI if you can.
I'm not sure how you'd do that, given many features wouldn't exist without AI. We don't know how to implement them that way. The only existing choices are "no feature" and "AI feature".
Eventually everybody grew into it, and we can't imagine life without the Internet. AI is having that same moment right now. The breathless hype bombardment will eventually give way to normalcy just the same.
Of course, it's likely that we'll get past that point, where AI generated images aren't in the uncanny valley, but until then it's off-putting.
Recently I had an email from someone praising my open source work and it was clearly AI generated, which felt completely insincere. And so, misuse of AI in situations where it makes the human being that interacts with it balk isn't good either.
As you say the language is annoying: "AI powered" or similar language is just meaningless to most people. People are not turned off by features in software that 'just work' because there's some AI running quietly behind the scenes. They're put off by bold claims that don't actually materialise and the human/AI interaction-boundary that can sometimes lead to more effort on the part of the human.
AI is a technique used by software engineers, we shouldn't need to talk about it at all (except to each other and maybe VCs). We don't market our apps as "Relational database powered", in time we won't mention AI at all.
Same for AI generated text: it's super easy to see when something is AI generated and follows a pattern.
Those patterns get quite tiring to read after a while. In hotel websites, for example, there's often AI text that is obviously converted from existing tabular data. I would prefer to have proper UX for the data instead of the text. With text it's harder to scan for specific information or to compare between pages.
100% agree and wish I’d also made that point in my post! It’s like it’s taken the average of human creativity, so everything is average. The unrelenting blandness is definitely offensive.
Having said that, it is exactly why training an AI on AI output results in utter crap. This has been known since before AI, so it's funny to see it arising in this industry.
It also is being pigeonholed into areas where it is not yet ready. There are a LOT of examples out there on that.
A hobby of mine is using AI to find bizarre ways to code things that aren't the normal way of thinking of the problem. Obviously it isn't practical, but it is fun. I most recently got ChatGPT to generate Pi from a random length string of 5's like this:
~~~
from math import sin, radians
def fives(repeat: int) -> float:
repeated = 1 / int('5' * repeat)
value = sin(radians(repeated)) * (10 ** (repeat + 2))
return value
Yes, it uses a repeating string of 5's to generate pi. Call it with "fives(18)" as an example. This is a cleaned up version of what ChatGPT gave me, but all the same, it works. A string of 5's can give you progressively more accurate estimations of pi - more 5's, more accurate pi.
Bizarre question to ask an AI, but playing like this is how eventually discoveries are made, since it is capable of coming up with working answers.
(Edit: corrected markdown copy-pasta weirdness. You can copy/paste but have to remove the extra indents HN adds. It's normal python, you know how to do it.)
The problem with AI blogspam (and AI image spam) and is that most of it is not even interesting to begin with: the desired result and the prompts are already terrible, so even if it was custom drawn or written by a professional, it would be crap. With AI, because of the lower barrier to entry, people don't care about spending a few cents building garbage. This is why I doubt more quality AI will help. :/
The professionals using AI (and even then, a minority of them) actually spend the time to ensure they're getting quality results. Even AI requires some massaging to get what you actually want. It's a tool. Not a miracle. A carpenter doesn't just bang a nail once and expect things to hold together.
I'm not a particularly good coder. I'm just interested in the oddities that can be shown through code, and am just (barely) savvy enough to see it through. I only had a vague idea how you could get pi from a string of 5's, but it wasn't very hard to get ChatGPT to code it for me once I described it.
The same can be done with a randomish length string of 9's, but I'll leave that for others to discover.
If someone can't be bothered to write it, why would someone be bothered to read it?
This code just outputs almost-zero. It clearly just sets `repeated` to a number very close to zero, takes the sin of it - which will also be close to zero - and then multiplies that by a small number.
I don't think this is how discoveries are going to be made.
What am I missing here?
from math import sin, radians
def fives(repeat: int) -> float:
repeated = 1 / int('5' * repeat)
value = sin(radians(repeated)) * (10 ** (repeat + 2))
return value
Cut/paste that into your python repl, and make sure the lines are intact without the HN extra indents. Change the 18 to any int you want (except it overflows at 308... easy to fix, but not worth bothering).
It might be close to zero... but it's much more like 3.14... when you run it.
But using `sin`, and `radians` means that you equation to generate pi already has pi in it.
You can do the same with 9s, for the same reason you might be picking up on if you don't trivialize that there is another pi in the mix. You can't escape it when you're talking about circular things, regardless.
Every proof or non-coincidental estimate of pi (ie: not 22/7) out there has pi embedded in the proof somehow. Dismissing it is like saying the Pythagorean theorem is bollocks because they also add up to the same number of degrees. Even though you're describing it in lengths, the degrees don't disappear. This code is very much like that. Just not triangular.
It's not (quite) as trivial as just copying the pi.
sin(radians(repeated)) * (10 ** (repeat + 2)) = radians(repeated) * 100 * 1.8 / repeated = repeated * pi / 180 * 180 / repeated = pi
So this program is basically an equivalent of
multiply_the_argument_by_pi(555) / 555
This was a result of converting degrees to radians. There is another way as well.
from math import sin, acos
def nines(repeat: int) -> float:
repeated = 2 / int('9' * repeat)
value = sin(repeated) * acos(repeated) * (10 ** repeat)
return value
nines(18)
Took a while to convince me, but you got there.
value = sin(repeated) * acos(0) * (10 ** repeat)
The most embarrassing recurring ad I’ve seen lately is for some kind of device management IT solution with AI generated MacBooks where the Apple logo is completely mangled. No idea how you could overlook that or notice it but somehow think it doesn’t cheapen your company’s image.
Exactly this. Any serious company would manage their brand seriously. Even if you're a one person bootstrapped startup, you should take your brand seriously and get some artwork commissioned. It isn't that expensive and makes a massive difference to how you're perceived.
Using AI generated images says to me (rightly or wrongly) that you take shortcuts. So, if you take shortcuts with your brand, what's your product like?
When it works seamlessly, it fades into the background, letting non-engineers enjoy our creations. But when it falters, it distracts and adds no value.
Our focus should be on delivering flawless creations that provide real value, regardless of the technology behind them.
You pretty much have to be at the cutting edge of generative ai to generate images, etc, but it still may have a shelf life.
Sonu is an AI music creator. Regardless of music style, I can immediately identify it. There are some very obvious (to me, anyway) musical choices it makes with both notes, and their delivery.
Rick Beato (YouTube music personality, for lack of a better description) pointed out his kids can tell, but he can't. I think, at least with Sonu, the moment the sound clicks, you can't not hear it when it's there, whether the song is pop, metal, country, classical... it has that specific sound that can't be ignored when you notice it.
It's clear that it has been trained on everyone's real output, ever, and their "You can't request the styles of real artists" is just a figleaf.
But the output is impressive.
People often put things like that in their prompts, and confirmation bias tells them it worked when they run it a few times and get something that sounds like The Doors, even though the meaningless bit of prompt you gave it was simply ignored. The similarity is because of your words and description of the style. Period. Writing "Yngwie" in the prompt will get you arpeggios, but they sound nothing like him. Just as another example. Because the prompt is giving the AI genre cues only, and nothing so specific as actual Yngwie arpeggios, scales and ladder riffs.
The “figleaf” is the service saying “Oh we can’t use artists in prompts, here, let me use a prompt that looks suspiciously like a set of tags from a specific music site instead” nod wink. And then the underlying model quite often fills in a well known voice and style.
And that’s if the service spots the artist was in there and substitutes anyway, which it doesn’t always.
So regardless, prompts may or may not be giving detailed Yngwie arpeggios to the model, but the model is clearly trained on them and can reproduce eerily similar music and voices to any given artist when given the right triggers.
It’s (IMHO) clearly plagiarism on a massive scale.
Great fun to play with though.
(To be crystal clear, my contention is not “they are doing some dodgy prompt stuff to make their model produce known artists”, it is that their model is very good at spitting out massively ripped-off voices and styles. It is their attempts to cover this with “we don’t allow you to specify an artist!” that are the figleaf over the nature of the model)
The other day I had someone mention to me their copywriting prompts were still looking basic.. and right away I knew his process was basic or dated.
Sometimes it sounds like every singers voice that can fit a genre can be heard at once unless you specify it.
We're not sick of AI. We're sick of it being used for the wrong things.
Also, random idea for the company name; EnnuAI. A play on "ennui" promoting something like "hey, we do the tedious and boring stuff so you don't have to!"
Not much of a marketer myself, but thought I'd throw it your way.
Because a lot of us are addicts.
I saw an interview with Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) and right behind him was a rack with a Pod Pro amp simulator. I recognized it because I have one, and indeed, you can easily dial in his tone and typical amp sounds. But I'm left wondering how many Sabbath fans noticed that he's using digital modeling these days, or if they can even tell when he started doing that.
People don't like change. It takes a lot of marketing hype to create motion for change to happen. And most people won't even notice it happen. Just like with Sabbath albums.
Messenger-style chatbots abound today. They're everywhere. As well, you have Twitter and Youtube bots that are the grown up version of the irc bots from days gone by.
- Some Internet Wag.
That's the thing, isn't it. AI output is so low-effort that it may as well not exist at all. Just send me the prompt instead, if you're going to do that.
When an entire culture is built on constant pointless pretense, is it really surprising that there is considerable effort put into optimizing it?
I think this goes beyond just consumers. If you listen in on a random companies' strategic planning... Any project with "ai" in its title is likely to be bullschtick.
"AI enabled" is our 2024 "now with electrolytes."
The thing about AI is it reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about speeds and fees.
People care about "1000 songs in your pocket" not "30GB hdd". AI seems to be the "30GB hdd" and people don't always relate AI to how it's going to help them.
How many users know the difference between MFM and RLL hard drives? Now keep progressing that technology wise. People only know and care that they got bigger and faster. Do users care that the file system may or may not be self-defragging?
It saves time.
*shrug*
AI is the shovelware wii game of the 2020s
I wonder what this will do to the YC S24 batch... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S24
I mean I respect the grift I guess, but I'm not surprised in the least that people are quickly growing tired of it all. Some of the ideas I'm seeing on that list are just straight up idiotic, but since it leverages AI somehow it's suddenly a good idea, I guess...
Man, I wish shovelware games had been a temporary problem we grew out of. The Switch store is still riddled with them, and the PSN store has some obvious grift as well. All of the "Jumping <Food>" SKUs that are just achievement fodder, for example.
Somebody must be fast-tracking straight to enshittification.
Consider how many atomic themed products there were in the 60's. We can be thankful that the only way most of these were actually atomic is in that they were made of atoms. The naivety if those days has gone. Information (true or not) travels so quickly now , everyone is a bit jaded. Many are outright nihilistic.
It's worth noting that people's opinion of AI in product is distinct to the actual AI itself.
I'm not in a position to find the reference right now, but I remember reading about a study which showed people felt that when given artworks to judge, the ones they were told were by AI were inferior. This was independent from whether or not each piece was actually by an AI or a human.
AI is a keyword for investors currently, that's all. Like all the companies that previously sprouted a blockchain unrelated to their core product.
Someone else linked it above, but after seeing this, yeah no wonder people are getting tired of it. Basically every single company in the batch mentions AI.
I also like general purpose chat/writing/instruct models and they're a nice curiosity, even the image generation ones are nice for either some placeholder assets, texture work, or some sometimes goofy art. HuggingFace has some nice models and the stuff that people come up with on Civitai is sometimes cool! Video generation is really jank for now, I wonder where we'll be in 20 years.
Overall, I'm positive about "AI", but maybe that's because I seek it out and use it as a tool, as opposed to some platform shoving it down my throat in the form of a customer service bot that just throws noise at me while having no actual power to do anything. There are use cases that are pleasant, also stuff like summarizing, text prediction, writing improvements, but there are also those that nobody asked for.
And that's where the whole chatbot, AI or no, thing falls a little. No matter how smarmy or even actually helpful that chat thing is, it doesn't shake my hand, won't do me favours, probably not take me to the shops after work, and ask me whether I need help or why I look sad. Nor complement me on my eyes.
I don't know; at least in me, the herd animal roars loudly enough that I feel unvalued whenever I am forced to interact non-physically. The distance can be felt. And to me, that is not a "protective distance" but an "excluding" one. Makes me more lonely.
But I don’t think it’s a signal to consumers as much as a signal to investors and competitors. Since when does the consumer care about which technology was used to build a product? Has a consumer ever said “wow this product is so good it must have been built with Rust!” The bottom line is it shouldn’t matter and it doesn’t. People need features, not technology, even though many of them confuse the two.
For example Notion. They have an AI feature, and it's hilariously useless. It can barely even summarize things, yet alone write the rest of the document for you. Yet they push it constantly onto you with no way of disabling the crap.
What I have noticed is that the marketing people are in love with it, because it lets them generate the useless drivel they spam people with easier than before. I suspect they never used their brains much, but now they don't even have to at all!
Coincidentally, scammers also love it for similar reasons...
They do use it to write drivel. They write promotional posts, mass emails and LinkedIn requests, briefs for their conferences and events... The typing speed of one of these guys was about two words per minute, ChatGPT probably really does save him hours. I noticed he mostly uses voice input. When I say stuff like I want to think about what points to make he'd get confused, he'd just ask ChatGPT what points he could make. He doesn't even think about that part anymore.
I can certainly see how those kinds of people will push product teams to integrate assistant features and happily promote them. It really does seem to be life changing for them.
Personally, I can't relate though.
AI/CoPilot/Chat-GPT was mentioned 100 times in the 34 mins I was in it. ( I was tallying, cause I'm sick of it)
And thats not including text on the presentation. just the times the words were said.
As a consumer, why would I choose a company optimizing for their margins at the expense of my experience? Touting AI has become a warning sign that the company is doing this.
1. cheaper
2. worse
It's invariably used as a cost-cutting measure that is quick, cheap, and worse. Companies use AI art because they are too cheap to hire a real artist that would make better art. Companies use AI chatbots because they are too cheap to hire real customer service agents who could actually help people.
If a company slapped a label on a bag of chips that said "Now with fewer chips and less flavor!", I'm sure that would turn off consumers as well.
Once the initial hype is over, we will just take it for granted that the software we're using is doing something with AI. The costs will have to either be solved, or flipped to the consumer, though.
Right now, it's a free-for-all, and worth taking advantage of, if you can.
Everyone knows this -- even the people pushing it. We know what it is doing to art, what it is doing to just being able to find a book on amazon, what it is doing to reviews, to website searches, to authenticity everywhere.
Splitting hairs about whether people think it's the terminology or the functionality is absurd. Stop making generative AI products that are the cultural equivalent of breaking into the community pool solely to piss in it.
People don't really want this. They have an instinct that a lot of AI products are little more than grift (trained by their experiences with "Web 3.0"). And this study is showing that.
No they don't. Phrasing like this is typical for people who want to persuade others that their opinions are somehow widely shared. It's a cheap rhetorical trick. Populists use this all the time. That doesn't make it any more true.
Some people might want that to be true (including you apparently). But most people haven't got a clue when they are using AI or aren't using AI and can't articulate what it is and are perpetually confused about anything technical.
You are probably right about everyone getting a bit worn out about everybody blabbing about the topic. That's because most of those people don't make any sense. And of course there are a lot of products that are pretty bad that advertise their supposed AI qualities. So understandably, people are a bit put off by that.
If you read a lot of stuff that uses phrasing like you just used, you are likely suffering from confirmation bias. That's a thing that causes people to genuinely believe they are right about something because they unconsciously avoid consuming information that disagrees with their views and seek out peers and sources of information that confirm them. Everything they see and hear confirms them in their biases. A lot of media sources actually prey on this by feeding lots of (AI generated, of course) content that deliberately manipulates groups like this.
All this study really shows is that people are tired of vague AI features that never really deliver on their promises. But they happily read a lot of stuff on twitter, linkedin, youtube, etc. blissfully unaware that they are consuming a lot of generated content that is fed to them by an AI that decides what they should consume next. All those supposed AI haters are hopelessly addicted to things like Tik Tok, Instagram, and what not.
The trick with selling AI is to not talk about it. People love magic. Just don't tell them how it works.
But you said...
> Phrasing like this is typical for people who want to persuade others that their opinions are somehow widely shared. It's a cheap rhetorical trick. Populists use this all the time. That doesn't make it any more true.
Is it only a problem when someone you disagree with does it, then? "Most people haven't got a clue" is also something populists say, I think you will find.
I tend not to write off whole swathes of people as non-technical. There's no such simple thing as a non-technical person, and people can like or dislike stuff without having a deep understanding of how it works. Generative AI is pretty widely distrusted and reviled; we know the damage it is going to do to trust and culture. It is poisoning the well of AI development. Studies like this shouldn't be a surprise.
The degree to which our culture is already largely controlled and manufactured by corporations and sold to us without our input or consent is a separate conversation we should have, collectively, because AI is just pissing harder into an already pissed in pool in that regard.
It is, and I agree.
But I suspect you agree with me that this is not how people feel.
If you see someone lying on the street, bloodied, and you don't help, expect to be judged by that person about as harshly as they judge the person who beat them up.
Corporate culture has never come for art and writing as dismissively and callously as generative AI does.
This isn't pop stars and TV. This is coming to the artist who has self-taught oil paintings, the photographer who has built their own artistic camera, the pencil sketch artist who has learned photorealistic sketching and saying "hey, I know your work is almost impossible to share with people already and sharing it is the thing that makes you feel good... but I'm going to make that worse by drowning it in autogenerated shit. Oh and hey, you know how you developed a style and sold a couple of things? I've trained my system so that your customers can just generate work in your style without even giving you money, so that should make you happy, right? Happy customers are good."
This is not a mere extension of corporate culture. This is a callous, systematically careless, dismissive kick in the face to people on the ground. And we all feel it, either on our own behalf as creative people, or for those artists we admire.
The degree to which our culture is already largely controlled and manufactured by corporations and sold to us without or input or consent is a separate conversation we should have, collectively, because AI is just pissing harder into an already pissed in pool in that regard.
For example:
* You enter an ambiguous search term into a search engine. It shows you some results, but it also shows you some buttons to filter by meaning. For example if you've entered "universal", it could give you an option to filter out all pages where "universal" appears as the name of the film studio, without a hack like excluding "universal films", but actually deciding based on context
* If you've touched up a few photos the same way, an image processing program could give you a suggestion for a touch-up for the next photo, along with options to tweak it
* In an email program, if you've moved a few emails to a folder, it could suggest a selection of other emails to move to the same folder, or maybe suggest to you a mail rule that would do it for you in future.
... and please, provide an option to switch it off.
[0] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/software/logi-options-plus.ht...
Secondly, I am slightly burntout looking at all the "BlockChain", "distributed", "Crypto" for like last decade and now suddenly the same products(and products from same people) did a swap of "crypto" or "blockChain" with "AI". Needless to say, my mind is jaded from all those scammy blockchain peedlers that when I see an "AI" (e.g. TodoAI, like wtf? I just want to add some text and dates and want to check those when am done or just show me a notification if I forgot..), I just feel like someone is trying to scam me.
Also, I noticed that some products suddenly hiked the price after adding the "AI" in their featureset, which wouldn't feel scammy(because inflation happened), but if I see some crappification of the product post AI, it just leaves a bad taste that next time I see anything with "AI" as feature, I assume it is also some crap. I know, don't judge a book by fathers and children must not be judged by deeds/sins of their fathers but what can I say.
Also, most of the products are clearly proxying stuff to ChatGPT with a system prompt, you can actually sense it, if you have used OpenAI apis. Which causes me extra pain, because c'mon, you are selling me a proxy with a prompt and charging me like $5.99/month!
People associate the use of AI in an existing area as being a poor-quality facsimile of the real thing, whatever the "real thing" is. That, or an unnecessary addition causing annoyance (aka Clippy)
On the other hand, for genuinely new use-cases where AI is central and beneficial, I'd be surprised if there was a negative reaction. It is "new shiny thing" vs "cheap plastic imitation".
Reminds me of The Graduate "One word. Plastics."
1. Making really, really, REALLY, shitty "art"
2. Writing nonsensical and boring short stories or bland written-by-committee memos that make you sound like a soulless AI
3. Creating summaries that are pathetic compared to the first paragraph of any wikipedia article on literally any topic (also, they are often 100% wrong)
4. Acting as a useless, actually worse that useless due to being both useless and time wasting, wall between you and a human who can actually do something "assistant"
5. Looking at images and telling me if there's a cat or a fruit in them
6. Being a worse chatbot than ELIZA was 50 years ago
7. Writing code that, if it is anything more complex than something you can copy and paste from Stack Overflow and have work, you have to spend more time fixing than if you had just written it yourself
But it is very good at bombarding users with an infinite stream of garbage content that is cheap and effortless to create so it will eventually devour everything.
It's literally just calling the OpenAI APIs with some overly complex system prompt. It is laughably useless, constantly lies, but some of our bigger (read: soul-less corpo) customers love it because they can get rid of a portion of their CS team even further than they've already been doing.
From what I've noticed, it's mostly marketers, spammers/scammers, and the C-level and their investor buddies that are excited about AI, and the not-so-cynic in me can't see it for anything else other than a way for them to fire people en-masse to make more money by automating their jobs away, regardless of if the quality is horrendous or not.
I think we're already reaching a point where regular people are kind of sick of all the AI shit, though. Who knows, maybe people start abandoning anything that smells of AI en-masse? It's nice to dream, anyway.
And even to those who think there is real meaning behind it, do you really think people want "intelligence" everywhere, artificial or not. People don't want their toaster to be intelligent, they just want it to toast. So what is an AI powered toaster? A toaster you have to argue with regarding how you want your bread toasted? And in many cases that's what happens when you replace a push button with an "AI assistant", so people are not wrong about it either.
AI isn’t going to magically help solve problems with technology. Frankly I’m tired of technology. I miss people.