Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Just an anecdote but I had a small mobile app that would make people pay money for the premium features, and (surprising for me) many people happily paid. Although the app had very positive reviews, it wasn't growing fast enough to make it into a meaningful income.

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"

View on HN

Sincerely, everyone in my real life I know bemoans AI hype. The only really love it has is in memes (things like voice swaping, singing politicians, things like that). I'm surprised people on HN have no exposure to such people.

I bemoan AI but it's been disheartening as the hype spreads everywhere. It feels like everyone is building an AI startup.

Maybe I'm naive, but it doesn't feel like we're done building the boring stuff yet.

We're not done building the boring stuff or solving the hard problems either. One is, well, boring and the other is...hard. Easy enough to proxy out prompts to OpenAI for your next funding round, though.

How many people in your life "hate AI" but love that feature in Google Photos that lets you search your photos by a person's name?

People don't generally like or dislike the combustion engine. They like the ability to get from place to place faster.

Probably when writing "hate AI" here the meaning was hate the often useless text chat bot. Google Photo face recognition was there before the new hipe and is probably not designated talked by primarily as "AI" by the general public.

People also like privacy, and most of the time "AI" means "your stuff is going to our servers".

I don't need or want that from most applications, especially a photo viewer.

> most of the time "AI" means "your stuff is going to our servers".

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.

Most everyone I know in real life do not care about that kind of privacy. They happily upload anything to anywhere on the internet. The people who do care tend to fall in one of two categories: More tech inclined (programmers), or the same kind of person who doesn't use online banking because they are afraid of losing their money.

Yes, but it is. It’s a well-known problem.

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.

It was never AI as people are using it today. Back in 2014 2015 2016 or whatever it was just facial recognition. In fact there's nothing smart about it. It detects the face and then you put a name to the face. It does nothing else.

I'm old enough to remember when the ability for machines to recognise faces was in the same category as flying cars: tech demos in the news, but you couldn't use them in any practical sense.

A constant theme in AI is that as soon as something is achieved, it becomes "no longer AI", just tech. That's kind of my point. Nobody cares what you call it or how it works, they care about the actual value they get out of the feature.

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.

Sure, but what car maker is yelling "Combustion engine in here, it's SO AMAZING!" - and would you trust one who is?

Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk has a combustion engine, it's SO AMAZING!

A lot of the ones with amazing combustion engines are a bit pricey. The Koenigsegg Gemera engine is cool.

> love that feature in Google Photos that lets you search your photos by a person's name?

Is that even considered AI by the hype/marketing machine? It's been around longer than these new language models.

AI is more than these new language models.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41119245 - as I said last time, it's become a cheapness signal.

I'm a bit wary that something calling itself AI may be like Siri or some bad customer service bot.

No this is actually exactly 100% it. It's not a strange situation it is just simple irrational exuberance for AI. Consumers do actually hate it. They don't want to be around it and they don't want it anywhere.

> 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.

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.

There’s the issue that many products seem to consider AI to be a feature in itself, and market it as such.

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.

In my experience, the people in my friend group are wary of AI because of the potential it has to eliminate jobs. I think the generally negative connotation comes from this "replacement of human effort" interpretation. If it can be done cheaper and easier with AI, that will naturally supplant effort a human could have made.

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.)

The current wave of AI stuff is likely not indicative of how AI will be used in consumer-facing businesses in the future.

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.

In other words, its job will be perpetual-bias-perpetuator! I cannot fucking wait.

Could be. One of the annoying things is that when the AI has a bias people agree with, they say "algorithms can't be biased!", yet when the AI has one they do disagree with "it's so unfair they've made it woke/racist [delete as appropriate]".

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.

The EU AI act that went into force today also spells out some limitations.

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.

> The current wave of AI stuff is likely not indicative of how AI will be used in consumer-facing businesses in the future.

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.

>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"

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.

It's hypothetical example for a product that is supposed to be a replacement to something we readily use but has an issue like being too expensive/rare/hard to make.

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.

It is incredibly obvious what is colloquially meant by “chemicals”. There’s no such thing as a fish. Blah blah blah. Don’t be tone-deaf in the name of scoring an extra point online.

Other than to baselessly denigrate, it is not obvious to me what is meant by “chemicals”.

A working description might be some combination of:

- 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.

The people posting about chemicals-in-the-food and stuff like that in my area definitely don't see high fructose corn syrup as a chemical - "it comes from corn and corn is grown in fields" is all I ever got out of that discussion - but definitely do see stevia as one.

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.

> There is no free lunch

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.

Heuristics exist because they are useful. It's not possible for an individual to research every new chemical that comes along. Even if they do, they don't have a good way of knowing if the research they are reading is reliable. So they need some rule for dealing with new chemicals.

1. Aspartame is not new

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.

But low-calorie sugars provide a rationalization for overconsumption instead of changing behaviors. To me, every single one tastes terrible. But worst, they send a confusing signal to your gut because the taste of sweetness naturally corresponds to easy calories, but when they don't arrive, you don't get satiated. This dovetails with the rationalization, significantly contributing to the obesity epidemic. Free lunch what?

Are you sure your claim is true? I drink a 12oz low calorie sweetener soda maybe once a week, and use low calorie sweetened chocolate chips (Bake Believe, uses erythritol) for things like cookies or pancakes (also eaten only once in a while).

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.

Claiming zero-calorie sweeteners, which by definition cannot contribute to weight gain as it's impossible, are "contributing to obesity" is a BOLD claim. I'm talking science-shattering hundreds of studies disproving bold.

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.

Me neither but I bought mushrooms just the other night and I kid you not the cellophane-wrapped styrofoam packet was emblazoned with a "chemical free" sticker so clearly it's gotta mean something.

What is colloquially meant by 'chemicals'? I usually take it to mean 'a substance with a name that I don't understand and that I think isn't natural and that I want to imply is not good for you' and there is no definition beyond that. It is perfectly reasonable to point out that this is irrational.

It's obvious, but worthless. It's an entirely subjective metric, easily gamed by marketing, and correlates poorly with things that actually matter.

> 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.

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?

I agree, IMHO people don't like to interact with AI, but they love it when the tedious work is done by AI.

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.

Most LLM-based chat user interfaces are just so terrible.

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?

Maybe because chatbots in general, not just AI chatbots, are a terrible idea in the first place? And even in the cases where idea might be somewhat OK (instead of wading through tons of support documents or FAQs just ask a question and get redirected to the answer) it usually is implemented terribly.

Honestly, what's the point of even considering implementing it if the only interaction will be "I want to talk to a human"?

> But use that same AI to quickly summarize reviews for a product into a digestible format that I can easy glance at, or ignore?

You want to give them more plausible deniability in lying to you about 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.

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 tech friends mostly find it interesting. On top of that some of them find it a little threatening, others (like me) are somewhat concerned about the ethics of hoovering up a significant proportion of human creativity and then charging money back to people for the output of models based on it.

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com