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Comment by dngray | Hacker News Reader

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.

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But that's the rare exception. Almost nobody prefers an artisanal chair over one from IKEA, especially when they see the price tag.

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

I bet someone said the same thing about an email or an IM vs a handwritten letter at some point in the past but here we are.

Those are not comparable.

One is the method of recording a message, the other is having something else completely draft a message for you.

The importance of a personal message is not just in the visual appearance or delivery, but that there has to be some emotional loading to even put the effort into drafting one.

With AI, it's a stupid prompt to get it to write trite poesy. It's meaningless and empty at its root. It's discourse with a nullity.

Nobody who values the human connections in their lives wants that. No matter what kind of marketing and fine print gets shoved and manipulated into their lives.

And it's still true!

I appreciate a birthday text/email, but a thoughtful email is nicer and an physical card/letter is better still.

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.

I think most people would in fact prefer an artisanal chair if not for the price, not just "especially" accounting for price. Not a good comparison here though, because most products are not cheaper to the consumer due to AI - only cheaper (in theory) to the provider.

Bingo. They weren't paying for gmail before, and they still aren't paying for it now that it's more annoying than it used to be.

I suspect that, in many cases, AI features actually make a product more expensive for the operator. Imagine how much of doordash's money you could burn by telling its chatbot that the only way for you to figure out where the driver left your order is to create a todo app in React.

Everything about that analogy is wrong.

Everyone would prefer a nicer handmade chair (if not by the price difference).

Chairs are not comparable to OPs cards; writing on a card costs nothing (but intent, which seems to be in low stock these days).

Finally, factoring in the real operating cost, ongoing capital costs, and environmental/social externalities, the AI chair in your example would cost something like 1000x a handmade chair.

> Everyone would prefer

far from true. I (and many others) prefer cookie cutter things, because I know what to expect, and due to quality control of big companies.

e.g. hotels > airbnb, amazon essentials > etsy hand-knit, Lays chips > Ray's chips

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.

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

Hallmark built a brand on creating generic messages in 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.

You're supposed to write an additional message inside the card...

I'm pretty sure you could do this with an AI card as well...

This is an incredible comment, and now I can just imagine the dismay of people receiving a card from the parent poster.

I don’t really want to defend Hallmark too much but I’d argue they provide a means of low effort personalisation. You choose a design that reflects you and your relationship to the recipient. You write a personal message inside (hopefully). The alternative is creating a card from scratch which is a big step up in creativity and time requirement.

If you don't actually take the time to write something manually inside the card, that's as thoughtless asking an LLM to generate a birthday message to someone.

Perhaps, but you can tell that these cards were made by real people. The art, messages, etc. are all different with varying levels of humor, seriousness, etc. LLMs really seem to converge to specific patterns regardless of the task that are instantly identifiable and low quality. What ends up happening is that the person on the other end thinks “this guy is a moron, he needed a robot to write out a happy birthday card?” Sure getting the hallmark card is mass produced, but they really do hire real artists and writers to make these cards. The robot creates a converged output that is instantly identifiable and has perceived lower quality.

If you send cards via a third-party subscription service that mails random cards to uploaded contacts in bulk, you'd get marks for setting it up the first time but as the cards pile up and the if the service is detected, it will eventually become a signal that you don't care enough to send them personally.

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