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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

> "Fuck off and pass me to a human"

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

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

Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.

So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.

Also the product itself is likely to suck.

One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.

I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.

AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!

This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.

I think you may be right. I enjoy tech and programming, but hardly any of my friends/family do. And nearly everyone in my inner circle (an admittedly small number of people, considering I'm an extreme introvert) condemns and avoids AI both for the reasons you mentioned and because they refuse to "outsource my brain to AI!"

In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).

I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.

I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists.

But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.

I actually don’t think most consumers care about that at all. Consumers loved Napster. They have no problem stealing from artists outright, let alone indirectly.

I think to consumers AI denotes lack of accountability or oversight. They think it might work - but it might not and no one will care.

For example, I’m doing work in standardized test prep and there are tons of new AI products and no one likes it. Consumers feel as if they will get subtle but important things wrong. Most of these companies are now trying to hide that they are using AI generated questions.

Hard to agree.

No one cares about plagiarism and artists.

I bet lots of people would even be happy that artists get smacked because they see only high profile and rich artists.

Normal people don’t care about AI and are not afraid that it will take their jobs.

They are pissed off because of they are paying customers they expect some level of respect.

AI bots are slap in the face, they ask basic stuff that human operator should infer from the conversation. But you are hit with a dummy that doesn’t solve any of your issues and have to spend time explaining yourself.

Funny part is that’s exactly the same as low income lvl 1 support.

But there is no comparison study. My idea is people are equally pissed off by lvl 1 support that they have to explain stuff in detail and get no real resolution.

What it also hits on for the average person is the uncanny valley. It just feels bad to talk to something mimicrying a person. It feels like talking to an invader at a deep, survival level.

> What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job

My unpopular opinion is that many or maybe most people don’t care about this.

They don’t care about where the content came from or if the artists get paid for the work. If they can get something (an answer to their question, some output that finishes their homework, some writing for a work assignment) more easily and with less cost or effort then they want it that way.

Look at piracy for a similar topic: It’s not even a derivative work, it’s just taking straight from the artists while bypassing their payment ask. Yet even on Hacker News every piracy thread fills up with piracy apologia and people saying artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output or that IP rights shouldn’t exist. Many people just don’t care about this stuff even when it’s direct source content taken 1:1 without paying. They definitely don’t care if the tool they’re using to do their homework or write that work email was trained on it.

I believe the issue here is that, simply due to how these products came to market, "AI" is extremely vague, and slapping "AI" on every single thing makes it almost a negative signal for quality.

For most users "AI" probably just means "chatbot" - and that's not compelling, because they can already access a chatbot, why would they want one in every product they use?

The more advanced features / workflows that LLMs can enable are kind of opaque if your points of reference are the ChatGPT web interface and summaries of search results on google.com - one reason that "agent" or "harness" have become useful jargon is that it distinguishes the tool we use and what it can do from the tech that backs it.

Because using AI in a product description is a signal to venture capital if private and investors if public, that your stock price deserves to go up.

Is it possible that the team collecting the feedback is reporting specific feedback for 'AI' terminology ?

Renaming customer service team to customer success team and claiming customer service issues reduced is like corporate/leadership strategy 101.

> 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

I think even this view is missing the point.

My opinion is that most people are overcomplicating this whole issue. When people react negatively to the term "AI", it's simply because the vast majority of features branded "AI" in the vast majority of products, are pure garbage. Searching for some deeper cultural or psychological reason is a waste of time - let's just stop pushing garbage AI products, then maybe someday people's perception of the term will change.

Until then, just leave that word out of the marketing material. Nobody really cares how the product is implemented, just focus on what it does.

That sounds a lot like trying to deceive your users.

every shitty feature has someone "writing in to tell you how "incredible" it is. Its not a proof that you think it is.

dont let that fool you into thinking "users were too stupid to undestand our awesome feature so we had to dumb it down for them"

All people I know hear when they hear AI is - they are automating art, there are layoffs incoming, they want to build a data centre next to me that will make my electricity costs go up, they are automating the consumer help call center.

The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.

> having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population.

It has an equally negative connotation to a rather large portion of the tech-savvy population as well.

also, if you haven't heard someone refer to something as _-slop, you don't get out much

AI tech is neutral - some good, some bad, and the bad is oversold compared to other industries. (Most people have no idea how incredibly ecologically destructive paper + print are.)

But the tech was captured and adopted by marketing-think and corporate opportunism. And that's the real problem.

Both were toxic plagues before AI. And as an amplification technology, AI has enabled them to unprecedented levels of fail.

The funniest one I've noticed lately is a bunch of Capital One ads saying "We built a multi-agentic system for finding a car to buy!"

I'm not saying I 100% wouldn't use AI to help me in product searches, but isn't one of the main selling points of AI that it is general-purpose? Why can't I just boot up ChatGPT and ask it what cars have XYZ things I need? Certainly being informed that Capital One's system is "multi-agentic" doesn't tell me much about what is being offered.

aye. I work with AI every day in an IT role and at this point I am painfully aware of its strengths and limitations. And it does have strengths.

But those strengths come with serious limitations, and huge society-level trade-offs. Annihilating the power grid in exchange for poorly formatted Powerpoint slides is not really a worthwhile exchange.

For most other products, like my cellphone, AI has no benefit except to further degrade my privacy, experience, environement, and battery life. Ditto for many other products with shoehorned AI.

> Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office.

Sadly for me this was my engineering manager

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

Hallmark built a brand on creating generic messages in card.

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

> "Hey google, what's the E.T.A."

I just tried this, verbatim, and it works perfectly.

> I ... disable(d) it

I see. So you intentionally broke the feature, now you complain about it being broken.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The deciding power they’re talking about is the power to decide to use or not use an LLM.

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.

> Why is everything sanded down to "good or bad"?

Amazon's Sentiment Analysis of Product Reviews was one of the very first forays into ML that the company had. They just keep wanting to re-use it everywhere.

On the other hand, one of my recent launch posts received comments such as "this is the sort of thing that is now possible with AI!", when I didn't use any AI at all.

Strangely enough, I don't recall any companies advertising to consumers that they outsourced.

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!"

> That mentality existed well before AI. See out-sourcing.

Consumers love outsourced call centers, don't they?

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.

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!

Surprisingly, my remote has a microphone.

You could take that a step further and say everything is information, and our brains transform it into reality (Donald Hoffman).

I think that's where it goes, yes. The ability to model the world internally predates spoken language. We (and other animals) already translate what we _sense_ into that internal model. Language is just another translation; all communication is bidirectional translation, internal modeling/thought is wordless.

Before calling it a day, this chatbot actually apologized for answering 3 hours too late because there were so many request at the moment.