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

dude250711

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.

voidUpdate

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?

dbalatero

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.

zx8080

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?

trollbridge

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.

amelius

"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!"

nerdjon

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.

Waterluvian

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.

aurareturn

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.

Muaz_Ashraf

still they use AI.

Muaz_Ashraf

still they use AI

ios-contractor

Then why did openAI make gazillions in revenue

ahartmetz

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.

dvh

Could be worse. It could be Blockchain.

AaronAPU

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.

dkga

I’m surprised it’s just sixty. I don’t think anyone, not the least consumers, wants AI used upstream of themselves.

jillesvangurp

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.

timcobb

Big talk from US consumers. The reality is we'll consume those ads and we'll love it. Sir, yes sir!

dbvn

Sir, this is a Wendys. I just want my burger

queeshonda

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.