alt Hacker NewsSixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
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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...
I'm shocked it's that low.
"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!"
60% of surveyed US customers
Aiaiai.audio looks nervously on
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.
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.
> "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!!
Surprise - water is wet.
Yet a third or so of HN submissions are about AI BS. Just another confirmation techdorks are out of this world.
Obligatory Stephen Collins:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2025/nov/07...
Sir, this is a Wendys. I just want my burger
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 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?
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
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.
To me, “AI” in their branding means data mining, collection and privacy violation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hell yeah
I honestly thought it would be closer to 60.0031073814%
What happens when VCs, governments and tech companies drive demand for a genuinely game changing technology beyond consumer's appetite for it?
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.
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.
Not yet 100%?
Skynet slop is still finding confused humans here. Will they end up loving and embracing their new AI masters?
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
still they use AI.
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.
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.
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still they use AI
Evidently I read the room wrong. Sorry for linking to my little project. Good day to you all!
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.
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.