alt Hacker NewsSixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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?
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.
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.
This reminds me of [Steve Job's response about OpenDoc at a conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o) where he points out that focus on the tech isn't as important as focus on the product. Companies are pitching the technology first and not the product, but customers want the product.
The label is now on ... pretty much everything -- to the point where it's completely meaningless. So, maybe everyone can just stop lazily slapping it on things?
You can already see what's coming, too. At some point in the near future, companies will make a point of offering products without AI (to whatever extent) and start offering the bespoke, organic or Classic (i.e. Mexican Coke) versions and charging even more for them.
I’m surprised it’s just sixty. I don’t think anyone, not the least consumers, wants AI used upstream of themselves.
To me AI in marketing is a signal that whatever business I'm looking at will pivot when a fad comes along. That is not what I want in any service that I plan to use for a long time.
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.
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.
Consumers are tired of going through a popup slideshow of "Try our new AI features!" they won't use every time their apps update.
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.
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?
> 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.When you start seeing infomercials on "AI sunglasses", you know AI has jumped the shark, and good riddance!
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.
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 mean the Coke flavour co-created by AI wasn't a resounding success with consumers? Who could have possibly known?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/coca-cola-uses-ai-to-create-a-fut...
I agree. What does it matter if it is AI? As long as the product does what it is supposed to do, use of AI is secondary.
I was at the grocery store a few weeks back browsing the clearance with my girlfriend.
To my amazement I picked up a, grifty “hair regrowth” supplement. Right on the top of the box, they had the text: “AI TECHNOLOGY”
If you want to know what the fuck is happening to this country you just have to understand that we’re at a point where a company finds it even worth slapping an obvious grift on an obvious grift because there’s enough low IQ idiots to buy.
Saying something is "AI" makes sense if it actually uses an AI model. But to appease certain people, you need to disguise or obfuscate that AI is used. I don't think the anti-AI crowd is up in arms about Firefox having a local translation feature, despite that it uses an AI model.
So so so true! I'm developing a product right now and will be using AI for part of it, but AI doesn't mean s**, the feature means something though so just call it by the feature that it is. You don't have to mention AI ever!
What was the demographic of people surveyed? because it would be interesting to know whether this is purely technical people or the average person
Outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber the attitude towards AI has shifted dramatically over the last few months. Folks still think the tech is cool but everyone is fed up with AI slop and all the noise and hype that’s failed to deliver.
The mood has shifted dramatically, but that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone that never leaves tech circles where it’s still all AI all the time.
60% of surveyed US customers
Big talk from US consumers. The reality is we'll consume those ads and we'll love it. Sir, yes sir!
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.
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.
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
Aiaiai.audio looks nervously on
I'm shocked it's that low.
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...
>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.