Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff | Hacker News Reader

Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

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>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.

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.

Goodhart's Law will always be a factor, and "the bottom line" is largely the ultimate perverse metric for Goodhart's Law. If doing something everyone hates still has a chance to increase revenue, it's still "winning" to management.

Low quality "spam" tactics still reel in enough fish to be monetarily worth the "backlash" from customers that find it distasteful and or start to lose trust in the company. The "We promise we don't spam people" metrics and "Consumer distrust" metrics don't talk enough to the "revenue" metrics, but especially have very different cycles: big customer satisfaction metrics like J. D. Power are big annual things, not quarterly reports like earnings. In my experience things like "how often are we calling the same disinterested people to the point where it starts to feel like very personal spam" metrics don't ever really get prioritized in internal reports unless there's enforcement from Legal departments, and even then Legal departments can't "upset the bottom line" and only care about such compliance when it becomes News and/or Lawsuits, both of which don't even merit even an annual review cycle. (In fact, the modern class action lawsuit pretty effectively prevents that feedback mechanism from cycling, because generally the terms of agreement in a settled class action lawsuit is that the class is no longer allowed to sue again for the same problem, even if the same problem keeps happening and is never actually fixed.)

Unless quarterly earnings reports need to include things like client satisfaction and spam tracking, the only metric management will continue to care about, because it also is the only metric shareholders claim to ever care about, is the "bottom line", no matter how ugly the sausage is made to bump it from quarter to quarter.

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!

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 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.

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.

Money. Often employees are the largest cost center.

The same people who liked outsourcing customer service to cheaper countries are of course going to love doing the same to AI

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.

They don't care. They only care about the metrics they were told to meet. They were told reduce headcount and use AI. So that's what they do and they have a spreadsheet to justify the numbers. A lot of times, in management, your goals are conflicting. You're only choice is to maximize them as best you can. If you don't your successor will.

If you can save millions in costs every quarter for the degraded experience, I can see why leaders want to take the risk. Really depends on who is making the calls I guess, for the services that depend on customer experience I would think an AI service agent would probably be out of the question.

They don't need to see the problem if their competitors are outsourcing customer service to AI as much as they do. It's like self checkout. Businesses love it because it saves them from employing humans at first world salaries.

> the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI

I had to call Geico's claims department yesterday and their AI customer service agent had a surfer bro accent, said "no worries" and "hang tight" and "I gotchu" while trying to follow-up on my claim which made it even more infuriating to interact with. Like... stop with the affectations and fake trying to be hip just be professional and succinct please!

>where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are

They don't care, since the sucker, sorry, the customer, keeps giving them his money

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, not people, just machines hitting targets they didn't decide on.

How could we possibly expect more?

In my experience, AI customer service agents can be really helpful for some things, but when they aren’t helpful they are the most annoying thing in the world.

I think this leads to a problem because leadership might see metrics showing that the AI service agent successfully helped with 80% of the questions it is asked, but they don’t realize how damaging that 20% is. Over time, more and more of your customer base is going to hit that 20%, so eventually everyone is pissed off at you.

It would be like if 1 in 100 Cheerios in a box were made of poop. It doesn’t matter that most of them are fine, people are going to remember that one cheerio more than the 99 others.

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…

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.

My best guess is the logical next step is Apple or Google giving you a (paid) AI Assistant who will call up and make that appointment for you. Then it's just AI talking to AI, which I guess is still better than having to make the call ourselves which I appreciate, but it's certainly silly sounding.

In this case it was to settle a bill. And I know I'm channeling a bit of Leonard McCoy here, but there's no fucking way I'm letting an AI take money out of my bank account. :)

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.

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 dealership's 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. By the time I managed to get to a human I was angry and distrustful.

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.

> 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.

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.

I agree. These days, automated voice response systems are actually less stressful.

with the keyboard typing and call center chatter... give me a break

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 went through the text logs for ours and it was all:

"Fuck off and pass me to a human" and stuff like that.

No one wants this who's calling you. We are literally damaging our company with it.

> "Fuck off and pass me to a human"

Honestly, I have uttered those same words when dealing with an offshored call centre.

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.

Yeah but unfortunately the majority of people calling are calling about things they can do themselves in the self-service portal.

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.

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 often a behavioral trap [0] that isn't effective 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 blocking all ad tech. I'll show anyone who asks me how to set up an ad blocker in a decent browser.

The real solution is to stop using YouTube.

> I immediately skip all youtube ads that are AI generated

Why not skip all of them?

> I can easily spot them

You don't know which ones you can't spot.

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 am not a fan of AI agents when used poorly either, but this quote is a bit of a logical trap. No customer or user wakes up and says "I hope I get to talk to a human customer service agent today" either. Having to contact customer service at all is already a friction point. If AI or a human or a monkey pulling levers can fix my problem quickly, I don't really care. It's when my qualm is unable to be solved quickly that I will start finding flaws in the process - and because humans lack empathy for machines, it's easy to blame the machine rather than the process.

AI being used to advertise a brand is a different story - absolutely it comes across as insincere and lazy.

> metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it.

Customers hating it only matters to decisions makers if it can causally be connected to lower profit in the next quarter. Otherwise, the immediate cost savings take precedence.

It depends on the product/service, but if it mostly works and there is a reliable way the agent can escalate to a real human if necessary, I can see potential in many areas. Most support requests did not try out the standard solutions or read any FAQ. So real humans aren't bored to death giving the same answers hundred times a day, but can focus on the real support cases requiring human intervention.

I did actually experience some chat bots that were helpful without needing a human to get my answer quick and some gave a number to call after exhausting their scope. But I am aware, that this is not standard.

This generalization is false. As a customer I've seen good implementation of LLMs in products and liked it. I don't think they weŕe revolutionary but they filled gaps in the interface. Also the models, so fair, are trained to be useful, honest and to follow user instructions. Which is a breeze from the standard pattenrs.

You may think that it would be better to talk with a human than with a chatbot but the sad reality is that the humans working at customer support behave more like a bot than the LLMs do. YMMV but in most cases I'd rather talk to an LLM.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But what if the difference is either talking to an AI now, and the chances are fair that it can resolve my problem vs. staying on the line for a real person, who may be better able to help me, but there is a 2 hours wait (not an exaggeration, Hawaiian Airlines made me wait this long). Suddenly the former doesn't look that bad?

The possibility of being useful sometimes does not imply that putting a button to invoke an AI in every app is actually a good idea.

You reference a customer support line. OK, but would you make it so every use of Google Search starts off with a call to a customer support line before the search results?

That's a circular concern. The only reason there would be a 2-hour wait, would be because the company didn't hire as many customer support agents, precisely because they want people to use the automated systems instead.

It wasn't obvious from the project outset that everyone would hate it, no matter how well designed it is?

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.

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

Do the customers know they're interacting with AI? If so, is that the intention?

Shitty companies usually outsource to Indian or Filipino call centers, but the AI is a chirpy fake white person.

Give it a robot voice, robot face, robot blank demeanor. remove the uncanny valley and make it more efficient than a human could be. People like efficient machines.

> 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.

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

>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.

How did you handle escalation to a human flow?

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.

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.

The hate Gen Z has for AI products and companies is intense. And they will look at you like a lesser person for using any AI product.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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!”

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.

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

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...

It’s so hard to find usable products when everything is “XYZ for the Agentic era”

Okay… what does that mean?

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.

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.

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

What's interesting is that all big LLM providers figured out that the revenue comes from coding as it can be trained with RL rewards.

It means that most people will never understand how fast the landscape is moving: non-coding and non-homework use cases didn't change that much since last year.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

the consumers will get what the oligarchs want

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.

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.

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.

Wrong. Most people would definitely _prefer_ the artisanal chair. However, they can't _afford_ the artisanal chair so they _settle_ for the IKEA chair.

There is a distinct difference between a chair and a communication (birthday card, letter, email, whatever) about some personal life event

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.

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.

Hallmark built a brand on creating generic messages in card.

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'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

“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.

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.

I mean I did data science and ML (more the engineering part) back when it was popular, and I kinda echo those sentiments.

ML folks told me their methods would only outperform traditional ones if we could feed the training pipelines an order of magnitude more data than we had. And if a process we're trying to predict only produces X amount of data over a meaningful timeframe, getting 10x, or 100x the amount usually requires 'lateral thinking', which even at the best of times meant either building mass-survelliance into the product or pulling in tangential data, to get marginally better results at best.

What actually worked was understanding what data we had, what it meant, what we missed, and after gathering that right information, even the simplest mathematical tools yielded results.

They still ended feeding the entire thing into 'fancy algorithm X' from scikit-learn, crunched the numbers on those fancy GPUs and got a 5% better result than what the simple methods gave us.

It was still framed as the triumph of these fancy algorithms and expensive data scientists and not people with domain expertise working hard to find and get the right data.

I'm not even salty at this point, I'm just kinda disappointed that a big org has such a hard time doing the right thing for the right reasons.

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.

Not to mention how many features that used to work have been summarily broken with no indication on whether we'll ever get them back, due to the wholesale replacement of previous functions with LLM-driven functions.

I can't even press the "favorite" button for my google photos on my google home device any more. It just says "I don't have access to photos" whether I use the button or voice (both of which obviously used to work).

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.

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.

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.

I mean they at least can afford to eat that way. I figure a solid portion, maybe the majority of the people who work in call centers are doing pretty much the cushiest job available to them.

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

I feel sorry for anyone that has to deal with account transfer due to end of life when working exclusively in LLM hell in your imagined world.

its not imagined, its already happening at scale in f500, the companies they work with to do this are going vertical

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

True, but companies seem more likely to publicly brag about their use of AI than about outsourcing their call center to another country.

Bombs existed before nukes. Is anti-nuke sentiment illegitimate?

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.

I think I hate interacting more with a person who refuses to think and deviate from the prescribed script. I at least understand an AI bot is incapable of providing a different answer. The person refuses out of indifference.

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.

Sure! But it's now more convenient when it's written up-front in the company name!

Never waste a good alreadism!

"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

"Just avoid holding it in that way."

- 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).

Funny, because my LG TV had Google Assistant (whatever that is) when I bought it, but it was removed. It was never in your face though, just a button on the remote.

It still has Alexa (it has both) but I never use it. I barely use the Echo that's next to the TV!

How do you use gemini on your TV? Type questions with the remote, 3 words per hour?

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 had the pleasure of communicating with the AI bot of FedEx (in Germany) today:

  > Everything is sorted out! 
  > Everything is now sorted out, and I hope this solution works well for you.

Of course nothing was sorted out (several mails and a call to the distribution center did sort things out).

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.

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 hate how chatbots call it a day after providing an unhelpful solution

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?

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/

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?

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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?

Why would Microsoft want their product logo forced front and center and easy to accidentally trigger in their OS that they also force on people?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

Ah yes the famous useful AI generated tests:

a = 1

assert a == 1

(I've seen this for real, hidden among several hundreds of other lines)

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Customers do not care how things work under the hood - they only care about how well the feature works for them. There is no good reason to communicate that you’re using AI, other than to impress VC types.

I actually think the word “AI” in a name undersells the feature. “Background Remover” sounds like a more robust tool than “AI Background Remover”.

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...

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.

Could be worse. It could be Blockchain.

Couldn't agree more. There will be marketing trend for authenticity and real interactions. At least I hope so.

Personally I am at the moment that when I even slightly feel something may be AI output… I just stop reading. Sometimes it's just false positive, but there are some senstences / styling so ai-looking that I'm just tired off, even if its written by human.

In comments I see a lot about chatbots… Yep, it's just the worst of the worst. Most (all?) are just not helpful at all. Spinning around same things, but never ones you'd need. Sometimes I just feel they're programmed in a way to exhaust me to ditch and ignore the problem I had.

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!

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.

One of the best ads of seen is for the Ava AI Sales Agent. I have to stare at it because of its location near one of my favorite spots. They've found a model with dead eyes that perfectly capture the existential dread you feel as you see a future with fewer humans in your life, and instead it's just more machines.

Not sure if that's their conscious intention, but somewhere along the creative process, some living soul was able to express itself in the final product.

Here are the ads in case anyone else was wondering: https://bmoutdoor.com/info/artisan-stop-hiring-humans-ai-cam...

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.

    > 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.

Consumers are tired of going through a popup slideshow of "Try our new AI features!" they won't use every time their apps update.

Anyone who worked in tech long enough knows that tech-first marketing only works in summer very specific situations and for very specific segments. Most customers care only about whether the system solves their problem in the minimum amount of time/money/effort. Branding a specific solution to their problem is usually a sure way to get them to feel cheated.

When you start seeing infomercials on "AI sunglasses", you know AI has jumped the shark, and good riddance!

Everyone here be like "Hell yaeh! AI bad!"

But do ordinary people care? They can claim its a turnoff but does it actually make a difference to the bottom line? Skimming thru the article, it doesnt seem so.

People can complain all they want, just like they complain about ads but never use an ad blocker

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.

This still means that 40% of consumers aren't turned off at all. That seems promising for AI bulls.

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.

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!

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.

I see a big difference between AI people choose to use themselves (eg ChatGPT), and AI people are forced to use (whether unhelpful customer-service bots, or LLMs attempting to cover up for poor user interface design).

To me, “AI” in their branding means data mining, collection and privacy violation.

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.

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.

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...

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.

What was the demographic of people surveyed? because it would be interesting to know whether this is purely technical people or the average person

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.

Does anyone know who the authors of the study are and what the data basis was (how many people were interviewed, age brackets, etc.)?

"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!"

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?

I'm shocked it's that low.

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.

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.

Obligatory Stephen Collins:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2025/nov/07...

Are they consumers of AI or consumers of media?

> "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!!

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.

Aiaiai.audio looks nervously on

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.

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.

I used to think AI summaries in emails were sorta useful until I was dealing with a particularly long engagement with a law firm where their paralegal sends out AI-generated recaps. After a couple of months, I was at my wits end at the paralegal sending me these summaries. They absolutely trashed most conversation threads with barren slop and mixed up convo threads. I think it may have been Copilot they were using.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

what about the 40 percent?

Hell yeah

What happens when VCs, governments and tech companies drive demand for a genuinely game changing technology beyond consumer's appetite for 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

I honestly thought it would be closer to 60.0031073814%

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.

still they use AI.

Not yet 100%?

Skynet slop is still finding confused humans here. Will they end up loving and embracing their new AI masters?

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.

60% of surveyed US customers

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.

Do you have access to their financials?

Evidently I read the room wrong. Sorry for linking to my little project. Good day to you all!

This comment is irrelevant ad spam

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.

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.

Nah, Mythos are Fable primary purpose was marketing. And the fables about their danger were indeed lies.

More people see/are aware of the toaster than Mythos - those pointless integrations are (I suspect) what's driving sentiment.

They're different, but average people dislike both of them.

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)

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.

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