Just an anecdote but I had a small mobile app that would make people pay money for the premium features, and (surprising for me) many people happily paid. Although the app had very positive reviews, it wasn't growing fast enough to make it into a meaningful income.
So I told myself, why don't I add AI stuff on it like an AI assistant as a primary way of interaction? Everyone loves AI, it's the future!
Then the app retention tanked, as well as the install numbers and no purchase was made after that. People didn't even bother with leaving bad reviews.
Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it.
Like the artificial sweeteners maybe?
"0 calories and the same taste with the sugar? Why would anybody ever use sugar again, right? Lets short the sugar cane and corn fields and put all our money into artificial sweeteners production equipment and chemicals"
Sincerely, everyone in my real life I know bemoans AI hype. The only really love it has is in memes (things like voice swaping, singing politicians, things like that). I'm surprised people on HN have no exposure to such people.
No this is actually exactly 100% it. It's not a strange situation it is just simple irrational exuberance for AI. Consumers do actually hate it. They don't want to be around it and they don't want it anywhere.
> Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it.
This isn't that strange. There have been a number of things that people have tried to push upon consumers over the last few decades that just haven't landed. Notable examples: 3d TVs, metaverses.
There’s the issue that many products seem to consider AI to be a feature in itself, and market it as such.
People don’t care about it.
They just want to do whatever it was they wanted to do. It doesn’t matter wether the tool uses hardcoded empirical heuristics, a hand-crafted statistical model, AI, or leprechauns.
In my experience, the people in my friend group are wary of AI because of the potential it has to eliminate jobs. I think the generally negative connotation comes from this "replacement of human effort" interpretation. If it can be done cheaper and easier with AI, that will naturally supplant effort a human could have made.
Since non-techies are often the people being displaced in this scenario, it doesn't sit well with them when AI shows up in a product they like.
(For what it's worth, I mostly agree with this sentiment.)
The current wave of AI stuff is likely not indicative of how AI will be used in consumer-facing businesses in the future.
At the moment, it’s there for all to see, be it as a chatbot or whatever - but the real applications will be under the hood, not directly interacting with the consumer, doing everything from market microsegmentation to tailored recommendations to diagnostics, credit scoring, criminal profiling, fraud detection, and all of the things that currently rely on sub-optimal human-crafted algorithms or even hand-cranking.
So all in all, what consumers think of AI is almost neither here nor there, as they are not the primary market - business and government are.
> The current wave of AI stuff is likely not indicative of how AI will be used in consumer-facing businesses in the future.
wut. the first real deployments we've seen of LLMs are chatbots, esp. those aimed at consumers. hence all of the "sell me a Chevy for $1" memes.
> At the moment, it’s there for all to see, be it as a chatbot or whatever - but the real applications will be under the hood, not directly interacting with the consumer, doing everything from market microsegmentation to tailored recommendations to diagnostics, credit scoring, criminal profiling, fraud detection, and all of the things that currently rely on sub-optimal human-crafted algorithms or even hand-cranking.
That's already a thing, and is what FB and GOOG (or banks like Ant Financial, etc.) have been making money off of for years.
>"0 calories and the same taste with the sugar? Why would anybody ever use sugar again, right? Lets short the sugar cane and corn fields and put all our money into artificial sweeteners production equipment and chemicals"
No one ever thought this because low calorie sweeteners taste different than refined sugar. Even cane sugar tastes different than high fructose corn syrup. Also, they are all chemicals. Everything is. Stevia is even extracted from a plant, just like cane sugar or corn syrup.
It's hypothetical example for a product that is supposed to be a replacement to something we readily use but has an issue like being too expensive/rare/hard to make.
I don't know much about sweeteners, for me its this thing that you can use instead of sugar if you are concerned about calories.
It is incredibly obvious what is colloquially meant by “chemicals”. There’s no such thing as a fish. Blah blah blah. Don’t be tone-deaf in the name of scoring an extra point online.
> Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it.
I think everyone is tired of conversing with a chatbot over text by now. But there are ways of integrating AI without making the primary interactions a pain. I'm also a bit puzzled by why people think it's a good idea in the first place
Using a chatbox as a way to do primary interactions? Nope. But use that same AI to quickly summarize reviews for a product into a digestible format that I can easy glance at, or ignore? That last one actually saves me time, and doesn't harm my user experience, so why not?
Most LLM-based chat user interfaces are just so terrible.
They seem interesting on a surface level, because it feels like they should be able to help with whatever issue you have, and the demos make it look as if they do, but in reality, they almost never do anything. They just pretend to be a human who has the ability to actually do something.
When Microsoft showed Windows Copilot, what they showed made it feel like you could do things like tell it to "create a new user account with the name John and the password 285uoa29tu and put the picture of a dandelion as the profile picture," but you can't. It can't really do anything, other than give you (often misleading) advice on how you can do things yourself.
People have learned that. They have learned that these chat LLMs are just a facade used to waste their time, a simulacrum not of a human being, but of the outward appearance of a human being. It's another hurdle companies put in place for people to jump across before they can talk to an actual person who has the actual ability to do something for them.
So when people see "AI", they don't see "helpful tool," they see "an obstacle I have to get rid of to actually get anything done."
I agree, IMHO people don't like to interact with AI, but they love it when the tedious work is done by AI.
The interaction part is cool at first until your curiosity about the tech itself vanishes. The current AI tech has some very useful use cases and its here to stay but its not replacing human interaction or the Human-Computer interface as I previously believed.
The AI pin, Rabbit and who knows who else failed in attempting to replace human interactions or screen UI with speech or text.
Chatbots look so deceivingly capable but they are completely useless when it comes holding authority and trust.
Every real human will always provide you with accurate information best to their knowledge and when they fail on it(sometimes in bad faith) its considered a big deal and can lead to anything from being angry with to not trusting that person ever again(therefore ignoring that person when possible) and in some cases imprisonment of the person.
AI lying is too cheap to warrant a human interaction. It's pure waste of time when it comes to doing anything consequential.
Maybe because chatbots in general, not just AI chatbots, are a terrible idea in the first place? And even in the cases where idea might be somewhat OK (instead of wading through tons of support documents or FAQs just ask a question and get redirected to the answer) it usually is implemented terribly.
Honestly, what's the point of even considering implementing it if the only interaction will be "I want to talk to a human"?
> Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it.
I’m surprised to learn that so many product makers are hyped about AI. I just assumed that everyone is doing it because they’re being forced to by the marketing department.
Of course there are some good uses of it, mostly on the pattern recognition side, but on the generative side, that type of use seems best confined to their own silos and not incorporated into every product.
My tech friends mostly find it interesting. On top of that some of them find it a little threatening, others (like me) are somewhat concerned about the ethics of hoovering up a significant proportion of human creativity and then charging money back to people for the output of models based on it.
My non-tech friends, particularly the more creative ones hate AI and will actively avoid it. They see a way for rich tech bros to put real people out of jobs. They see ahead of them an internet drowning in AI shit (on an internet already drowning in non-AI shit), further enshittifying their day to day interactions. And they see yet another ludicrous hype cycle.
My challenge to AI-using folks is the same as it was to blockchain people - make a product with compelling, amazing features. Don't mention AI, just sell it on how awesome it is and how amazing the capabilities are. Use AI/ML under the covers to achieve that awesomeness without trying to ride the hype wave. Then you'll have achieved something.
The difference is, of course, that I imagine that AI will (and to some extent already does) deliver on that...
I travel often in Europe and see these AI assistants on many websites and apps now. Two things generally happen when I have tried to use them. First, nothing actionable is possible. They can't actually do anything. No trip changes, refunds, connections, or baggage tracing. It takes a significant amount of time to get to to the response, "Sorry I can't help with that, please call xxx during business hours or visit our website at xxx." Second, they invariably end up as marketing funnels with upsells offered in place of solutions. I see that as the main source of anger from others in airports. They try to deal with something and end up in marketing loops.
When I see AI assistance as a travel feature I assume it is not only going to be useless, but actively disruptive to my experience.
> they found that products described as using AI were consistently less popular.
Branding the mistakes LLM's get as hallucinations was sort of brilliant in my opinion, it was a good way to disguise the fact that LLM's are mostly just really lucky. In my anecdotal experience it hasn't worked out too well though, so maybe it wasn't that brilliant? Anyway, parts of how the AI impacts our business (solar energy + investment banking) has been through things like how Microsoft Teams was supposed to be capable of transcripting meetings with AI. Now, we're an international organisation where English is at best the second language for people, and usually the third, so this probably has an impact on it, but it's so bad. I know I'm not personally the clearest speaker, especially if I'm bored, but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously bad that they often become the foundation for the weekly friday meme in IT. Which may be innocent enough, but it hasn't been very confidence building in the higher ups who thought they wouldn't have to have someone write a summary for their meetings, and in typical top brass style didn't read the transcripts until there was some contract issue.
This along with how often AI "hallucinates" has meant that our top decision makers have decided to stop any AI within the Microsoft platform. Well every thing except the thing that makes power point presentations pretty. So our operations staff has had to roll back co-pilot for every non-IT employee. I don't necessarily agree with this myself, I use GPT quite a lot and while github co-pilot might "just" be fancy auto-complete it's still increased my productivity quite a lot as well as lowering my mental load of dealing with most snippets. That isn't how the rest of the organisation sees it though, they see the mistakes AI makes on areas where no-mistakes are allowed, and they consider it untrustworthy. The whole Microsoft debacle (I used chatGPT to tell me how to write "debaclable") where they wanted to screenshot everything all the time really sunk trust with our decision makers.
>but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously
My experience on AI transcripts is different: I use auto (AI) generated captions on YouTube for every video and while there sure are some mistakes with especially names and specialized words, in general it is highly understandable. So much so that that I miss the auto generated captions when they're not available.
Even if real captions are available, on occasion I have to swap out from the human made captions to the auto generated AI captions, because believe it or not in some cases the AI generated captions are actually better with less mistakes! I find that rather impressive from the AIs side.
> but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously bad
They improve significantly with microphone quality. I have a professional voice recording setup I use with Teams and the transcripts are usually around 90% accurate. A tool like AWS transcribe tends to get 95% on my voice work.
Important clarification: consumers are turned off by AI marketing material.
I'd be interested to see real studies into consumer satisfaction with AI features in existing products. My gut feeling is that people don't like (visible) AI in things they use, but that's biased by me reading online reporting about the failings of these features, I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them.
I am certainly turned off by “AI” customer support. The ones I’ve encountered are actively terrible, and I’d rather click through a tree of first-level fix-it-yourself advice than get walked through it by a stunningly poor AI.
But sure, it would be spiffy if Siri was more capable, as long as it didn’t become susceptible to injection attacks from my photo album in the process…
When The Weather Network first included an AI chat function, one of their sample questions was about stargazing.
I asked the exact same question to see what kind of response it would give, and it said that it couldn't answer because weather does not affect star gazing. Really?
I took a screencap, because this was such an epic example of why companies should actually test things before giving public access to them.
Every time I hear it contains AI it sounds like the features' outcome will be uncertain. Especially with more experience. If your feature were good you wouldn't have to mention AI to show it is awesome.
More than not AI is used as an excuse for the feature to be bad.
I tend to agree. If you asked about a feature which uses some kind of ML under the hood to deliver that feature you'd different results. I think companies should urgently pull back on mentioning AI at all if they want any credibility at this point.
Okay then at what point do the users become reliable narrators? The AI cheerleaders can take comfort in that AI is in the hands of the average person now—but they also have to contend with any negative reactions as well.
AI isn’t some behind the scenes technology (any more). And companies with their “AI” gimmick often highlight it with a star or something. People can chat with these things as easily as doing a Google search.
I'd buy that people like "AI" features writ large; automatic image classification on your phone, say. However, I'm not convinced anyone much likes the existing applications of LLMs (mostly terrible obstructive chatbots, and blogspam).
> I'd be interested to see real studies into consumer satisfaction with AI features in existing products
mmm... I guess....
I mean, a feature that is not 'obviously AI' is just a feature; even if you normalized it against 'normal' features with no AI as part of them, surely the deviance from random noise would be negligible?
In a double blind test, you would have three cohorts; control, placebo and treatment (ie. AI).
Since the placebo and treatment groups would receive the same feature with or without AI, you'd be looking at absolutely nothing meaningful in the data you collect.
> I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them.
How can users POSSIBLY have a positive / negative / ANY KIND of meaningful response to a feature based on the unknown backend implementation?
If you put a chatGPT interface on your product and don't put an AI label on it, I guess most people, not being completely stupid, will not meaningfully distinguish between it and the equivalent feature with "Artificial Intelligence" painted on the side. An AI chat bot is an AI chat bot. You're not fooling anyone by calling it an 'intelligent assistant' instead of 'chatGPT'. :P
I mean, I'm just guessing, you could study it. ...but, I guess it's probably not worth bothering.
It's probably more likely the take-away here is: Make your product amazing; if it uses AI, hide that fact that it uses AI if you can.
> would receive the same feature with or without AI,
I'm not sure how you'd do that, given many features wouldn't exist without AI. We don't know how to implement them that way. The only existing choices are "no feature" and "AI feature".
They're turned off on the lingo showing up everywhere, regardless of its relevance (or lack thereof). It's similar to when the Internet first started becoming commercial, and people were revolted by terms like "information superhighway" etc being thrown around so excessively.
Eventually everybody grew into it, and we can't imagine life without the Internet. AI is having that same moment right now. The breathless hype bombardment will eventually give way to normalcy just the same.
I think this is true, but it's worth expanding, because it's not just lingo. Personally, I am sick of seeing AI generated images in blogs, advertising campaigns, and in social media posts. There's a weird uncanny valley to them that always puts me off. I think subconsciously it makes me devalue whatever the image is attached to. I might end up being negatively biased toward a blog author, or refuse to engage with a company that is using AI based imagery.
Of course, it's likely that we'll get past that point, where AI generated images aren't in the uncanny valley, but until then it's off-putting.
Recently I had an email from someone praising my open source work and it was clearly AI generated, which felt completely insincere. And so, misuse of AI in situations where it makes the human being that interacts with it balk isn't good either.
As you say the language is annoying: "AI powered" or similar language is just meaningless to most people. People are not turned off by features in software that 'just work' because there's some AI running quietly behind the scenes. They're put off by bold claims that don't actually materialise and the human/AI interaction-boundary that can sometimes lead to more effort on the part of the human.
AI is a technique used by software engineers, we shouldn't need to talk about it at all (except to each other and maybe VCs). We don't market our apps as "Relational database powered", in time we won't mention AI at all.
To me the problem is not just being in the uncanny valley: even when they are realistic they are often way too mediocre! Not just the visuals but the content as well. It's always stuff that nobody would bother drawing or staging to take a photograph. And I associate it with laziness, low effort, low quality, throwaway content.
Same for AI generated text: it's super easy to see when something is AI generated and follows a pattern.
Those patterns get quite tiring to read after a while. In hotel websites, for example, there's often AI text that is obviously converted from existing tabular data. I would prefer to have proper UX for the data instead of the text. With text it's harder to scan for specific information or to compare between pages.
Lately I’ve been seeing Reddit ads with clearly AI generated marketing images and it just makes me assume the company is an unserious fly-by-night operation and/or a one person company.
The most embarrassing recurring ad I’ve seen lately is for some kind of device management IT solution with AI generated MacBooks where the Apple logo is completely mangled. No idea how you could overlook that or notice it but somehow think it doesn’t cheapen your company’s image.
When it works seamlessly, it fades into the background, letting non-engineers enjoy our creations. But when it falters, it distracts and adds no value.
Our focus should be on delivering flawless creations that provide real value, regardless of the technology behind them.
I disagree, partially. Yes, we are tired of the hype, but we are also tired of the focus on generative AI. I don't want AI to write stories, make pictures or be my girlfriend. Those are things best left to humans. I want AI to optimize my home or business's HVAC, help with database administration, tell me what I can cook with the random stuff in my fridge, maybe even help with project management. We're getting there, but the spotlight needs to turn from the "creative" tasks to the boring administrative tasks we don't want to do.
We're not sick of AI. We're sick of it being used for the wrong things.
Sure, but the companies have a different plan. The creative and skilled tasks are also where you have to hire the most expensive employees to do the job, and so cutting them is a dream for most investors. From a pure business standpoint the things "best left to humans" are the ones where the human is the cheapest option for the same result. Nothing more, nothing less.
Your desires are exactly where I've been working. I've been considering calling the company "Boring AI: productivity tools for real work" or something like that. I've been integrating LLMs into the internal structure of applications, so you can actually tell a spreadsheet bot "hey, I need this DNA table used to color a graph using this address table of people in this area" and a spreadsheet with graph is generated in under a minute. Likewise, I've integrated a collection of 'bot attorneys that can provide serious legal advice, and is in use at an immigration law firm.
...as soon as as the hype wave recedes, and vendors stop sticking the current-hot label onto everything. "MOUSE WITH AI" (*with a button that opens a browser window, how very innovative. But wait, it's a browser window pointed to an AI assistant!!!)
Guitar players know this as well. A lot of pedals and DAW (digital audio workstation) plugins electronically mimic old analog hardware. Everyone claims the software version is crap, not realizing just how much of their favourite music is using it.
I saw an interview with Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) and right behind him was a rack with a Pod Pro amp simulator. I recognized it because I have one, and indeed, you can easily dial in his tone and typical amp sounds. But I'm left wondering how many Sabbath fans noticed that he's using digital modeling these days, or if they can even tell when he started doing that.
People don't like change. It takes a lot of marketing hype to create motion for change to happen. And most people won't even notice it happen. Just like with Sabbath albums.
Internet was useable from early on and became more friendly to less technical users as time went by. AI generated bullshit output is of no use whatsoever and customers are turned off by being told that it's the future when this shit doesn't work. Remember messenger chatbots? Where are they now? Same fate awaits AI.
People were turned off by the text-only gopher and related protocols. It improved and we now have the modern web.
Messenger-style chatbots abound today. They're everywhere. As well, you have Twitter and Youtube bots that are the grown up version of the irc bots from days gone by.
AI is being pushed everywhere, and I couldn't hate it more. I don't want an AI assistant. I don't want to "talk" to a computer. I don't want a company diving mindlessly into the next trend just because they're afraid of being left behind. As others have said, it's a sign that a company doesn't really know what it's doing. I hear executives brag that they put all their emails through an AI assistant. This just tells me two things: they're apparently bad at articulating themselves, and no one is actually reading their emails.
"If you couldn't be bothered to write it - why should I be bothered to read it?"
- Some Internet Wag.
That's the thing, isn't it. AI output is so low-effort that it may as well not exist at all. Just send me the prompt instead, if you're going to do that.
I don't think it's disillusionment with the tech. Consumers barely touch the tech. It's disillusionment with the marketing
I think this goes beyond just consumers. If you listen in on a random companies' strategic planning... Any project with "ai" in its title is likely to be bullschtick.
I wonder if the same sentiment applies to products using .ai TLDs.
The thing about AI is it reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about speeds and fees.
People care about "1000 songs in your pocket" not "30GB hdd". AI seems to be the "30GB hdd" and people don't always relate AI to how it's going to help them.
We keep saying "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" while forgetting that technology only becomes good when we don't think about the technology anymore. It works like magic.
How many users know the difference between MFM and RLL hard drives? Now keep progressing that technology wise. People only know and care that they got bigger and faster. Do users care that the file system may or may not be self-defragging?
Readit News
So I told myself, why don't I add AI stuff on it like an AI assistant as a primary way of interaction? Everyone loves AI, it's the future!
Then the app retention tanked, as well as the install numbers and no purchase was made after that. People didn't even bother with leaving bad reviews.
Maybe we are in this strange situation where the people who make the products are so hyped about this new tech but the consumers are really hating it.
Like the artificial sweeteners maybe?
"0 calories and the same taste with the sugar? Why would anybody ever use sugar again, right? Lets short the sugar cane and corn fields and put all our money into artificial sweeteners production equipment and chemicals"
People don't generally like or dislike the combustion engine. They like the ability to get from place to place faster.
Maybe I'm naive, but it doesn't feel like we're done building the boring stuff yet.
This isn't that strange. There have been a number of things that people have tried to push upon consumers over the last few decades that just haven't landed. Notable examples: 3d TVs, metaverses.
People don’t care about it.
They just want to do whatever it was they wanted to do. It doesn’t matter wether the tool uses hardcoded empirical heuristics, a hand-crafted statistical model, AI, or leprechauns.
Since non-techies are often the people being displaced in this scenario, it doesn't sit well with them when AI shows up in a product they like.
(For what it's worth, I mostly agree with this sentiment.)
At the moment, it’s there for all to see, be it as a chatbot or whatever - but the real applications will be under the hood, not directly interacting with the consumer, doing everything from market microsegmentation to tailored recommendations to diagnostics, credit scoring, criminal profiling, fraud detection, and all of the things that currently rely on sub-optimal human-crafted algorithms or even hand-cranking.
So all in all, what consumers think of AI is almost neither here nor there, as they are not the primary market - business and government are.
wut. the first real deployments we've seen of LLMs are chatbots, esp. those aimed at consumers. hence all of the "sell me a Chevy for $1" memes.
> At the moment, it’s there for all to see, be it as a chatbot or whatever - but the real applications will be under the hood, not directly interacting with the consumer, doing everything from market microsegmentation to tailored recommendations to diagnostics, credit scoring, criminal profiling, fraud detection, and all of the things that currently rely on sub-optimal human-crafted algorithms or even hand-cranking.
That's already a thing, and is what FB and GOOG (or banks like Ant Financial, etc.) have been making money off of for years.
>"0 calories and the same taste with the sugar? Why would anybody ever use sugar again, right? Lets short the sugar cane and corn fields and put all our money into artificial sweeteners production equipment and chemicals"
No one ever thought this because low calorie sweeteners taste different than refined sugar. Even cane sugar tastes different than high fructose corn syrup. Also, they are all chemicals. Everything is. Stevia is even extracted from a plant, just like cane sugar or corn syrup.
I don't know much about sweeteners, for me its this thing that you can use instead of sugar if you are concerned about calories.
I think everyone is tired of conversing with a chatbot over text by now. But there are ways of integrating AI without making the primary interactions a pain. I'm also a bit puzzled by why people think it's a good idea in the first place
Using a chatbox as a way to do primary interactions? Nope. But use that same AI to quickly summarize reviews for a product into a digestible format that I can easy glance at, or ignore? That last one actually saves me time, and doesn't harm my user experience, so why not?
They seem interesting on a surface level, because it feels like they should be able to help with whatever issue you have, and the demos make it look as if they do, but in reality, they almost never do anything. They just pretend to be a human who has the ability to actually do something.
When Microsoft showed Windows Copilot, what they showed made it feel like you could do things like tell it to "create a new user account with the name John and the password 285uoa29tu and put the picture of a dandelion as the profile picture," but you can't. It can't really do anything, other than give you (often misleading) advice on how you can do things yourself.
People have learned that. They have learned that these chat LLMs are just a facade used to waste their time, a simulacrum not of a human being, but of the outward appearance of a human being. It's another hurdle companies put in place for people to jump across before they can talk to an actual person who has the actual ability to do something for them.
So when people see "AI", they don't see "helpful tool," they see "an obstacle I have to get rid of to actually get anything done."
Who would want to pay for that?
The interaction part is cool at first until your curiosity about the tech itself vanishes. The current AI tech has some very useful use cases and its here to stay but its not replacing human interaction or the Human-Computer interface as I previously believed.
The AI pin, Rabbit and who knows who else failed in attempting to replace human interactions or screen UI with speech or text.
Chatbots look so deceivingly capable but they are completely useless when it comes holding authority and trust.
Every real human will always provide you with accurate information best to their knowledge and when they fail on it(sometimes in bad faith) its considered a big deal and can lead to anything from being angry with to not trusting that person ever again(therefore ignoring that person when possible) and in some cases imprisonment of the person.
AI lying is too cheap to warrant a human interaction. It's pure waste of time when it comes to doing anything consequential.
Honestly, what's the point of even considering implementing it if the only interaction will be "I want to talk to a human"?
You want to give them more plausible deniability in lying to you about reviews?
I’m surprised to learn that so many product makers are hyped about AI. I just assumed that everyone is doing it because they’re being forced to by the marketing department.
Of course there are some good uses of it, mostly on the pattern recognition side, but on the generative side, that type of use seems best confined to their own silos and not incorporated into every product.
My non-tech friends, particularly the more creative ones hate AI and will actively avoid it. They see a way for rich tech bros to put real people out of jobs. They see ahead of them an internet drowning in AI shit (on an internet already drowning in non-AI shit), further enshittifying their day to day interactions. And they see yet another ludicrous hype cycle.
My challenge to AI-using folks is the same as it was to blockchain people - make a product with compelling, amazing features. Don't mention AI, just sell it on how awesome it is and how amazing the capabilities are. Use AI/ML under the covers to achieve that awesomeness without trying to ride the hype wave. Then you'll have achieved something.
The difference is, of course, that I imagine that AI will (and to some extent already does) deliver on that...
When I see AI assistance as a travel feature I assume it is not only going to be useless, but actively disruptive to my experience.
Yup.
Branding the mistakes LLM's get as hallucinations was sort of brilliant in my opinion, it was a good way to disguise the fact that LLM's are mostly just really lucky. In my anecdotal experience it hasn't worked out too well though, so maybe it wasn't that brilliant? Anyway, parts of how the AI impacts our business (solar energy + investment banking) has been through things like how Microsoft Teams was supposed to be capable of transcripting meetings with AI. Now, we're an international organisation where English is at best the second language for people, and usually the third, so this probably has an impact on it, but it's so bad. I know I'm not personally the clearest speaker, especially if I'm bored, but the transcripts the AI makes of me are so hilariously bad that they often become the foundation for the weekly friday meme in IT. Which may be innocent enough, but it hasn't been very confidence building in the higher ups who thought they wouldn't have to have someone write a summary for their meetings, and in typical top brass style didn't read the transcripts until there was some contract issue.
This along with how often AI "hallucinates" has meant that our top decision makers have decided to stop any AI within the Microsoft platform. Well every thing except the thing that makes power point presentations pretty. So our operations staff has had to roll back co-pilot for every non-IT employee. I don't necessarily agree with this myself, I use GPT quite a lot and while github co-pilot might "just" be fancy auto-complete it's still increased my productivity quite a lot as well as lowering my mental load of dealing with most snippets. That isn't how the rest of the organisation sees it though, they see the mistakes AI makes on areas where no-mistakes are allowed, and they consider it untrustworthy. The whole Microsoft debacle (I used chatGPT to tell me how to write "debaclable") where they wanted to screenshot everything all the time really sunk trust with our decision makers.
My experience on AI transcripts is different: I use auto (AI) generated captions on YouTube for every video and while there sure are some mistakes with especially names and specialized words, in general it is highly understandable. So much so that that I miss the auto generated captions when they're not available.
Even if real captions are available, on occasion I have to swap out from the human made captions to the auto generated AI captions, because believe it or not in some cases the AI generated captions are actually better with less mistakes! I find that rather impressive from the AIs side.
They improve significantly with microphone quality. I have a professional voice recording setup I use with Teams and the transcripts are usually around 90% accurate. A tool like AWS transcribe tends to get 95% on my voice work.
I'd be interested to see real studies into consumer satisfaction with AI features in existing products. My gut feeling is that people don't like (visible) AI in things they use, but that's biased by me reading online reporting about the failings of these features, I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them.
But sure, it would be spiffy if Siri was more capable, as long as it didn’t become susceptible to injection attacks from my photo album in the process…
I asked the exact same question to see what kind of response it would give, and it said that it couldn't answer because weather does not affect star gazing. Really?
I took a screencap, because this was such an epic example of why companies should actually test things before giving public access to them.
More than not AI is used as an excuse for the feature to be bad.
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AI isn’t some behind the scenes technology (any more). And companies with their “AI” gimmick often highlight it with a star or something. People can chat with these things as easily as doing a Google search.
mmm... I guess....
I mean, a feature that is not 'obviously AI' is just a feature; even if you normalized it against 'normal' features with no AI as part of them, surely the deviance from random noise would be negligible?
In a double blind test, you would have three cohorts; control, placebo and treatment (ie. AI).
Since the placebo and treatment groups would receive the same feature with or without AI, you'd be looking at absolutely nothing meaningful in the data you collect.
> I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out people mostly like them.
How can users POSSIBLY have a positive / negative / ANY KIND of meaningful response to a feature based on the unknown backend implementation?
If you put a chatGPT interface on your product and don't put an AI label on it, I guess most people, not being completely stupid, will not meaningfully distinguish between it and the equivalent feature with "Artificial Intelligence" painted on the side. An AI chat bot is an AI chat bot. You're not fooling anyone by calling it an 'intelligent assistant' instead of 'chatGPT'. :P
I mean, I'm just guessing, you could study it. ...but, I guess it's probably not worth bothering.
It's probably more likely the take-away here is: Make your product amazing; if it uses AI, hide that fact that it uses AI if you can.
I'm not sure how you'd do that, given many features wouldn't exist without AI. We don't know how to implement them that way. The only existing choices are "no feature" and "AI feature".
Eventually everybody grew into it, and we can't imagine life without the Internet. AI is having that same moment right now. The breathless hype bombardment will eventually give way to normalcy just the same.
Of course, it's likely that we'll get past that point, where AI generated images aren't in the uncanny valley, but until then it's off-putting.
Recently I had an email from someone praising my open source work and it was clearly AI generated, which felt completely insincere. And so, misuse of AI in situations where it makes the human being that interacts with it balk isn't good either.
As you say the language is annoying: "AI powered" or similar language is just meaningless to most people. People are not turned off by features in software that 'just work' because there's some AI running quietly behind the scenes. They're put off by bold claims that don't actually materialise and the human/AI interaction-boundary that can sometimes lead to more effort on the part of the human.
AI is a technique used by software engineers, we shouldn't need to talk about it at all (except to each other and maybe VCs). We don't market our apps as "Relational database powered", in time we won't mention AI at all.
Same for AI generated text: it's super easy to see when something is AI generated and follows a pattern.
Those patterns get quite tiring to read after a while. In hotel websites, for example, there's often AI text that is obviously converted from existing tabular data. I would prefer to have proper UX for the data instead of the text. With text it's harder to scan for specific information or to compare between pages.
The most embarrassing recurring ad I’ve seen lately is for some kind of device management IT solution with AI generated MacBooks where the Apple logo is completely mangled. No idea how you could overlook that or notice it but somehow think it doesn’t cheapen your company’s image.
When it works seamlessly, it fades into the background, letting non-engineers enjoy our creations. But when it falters, it distracts and adds no value.
Our focus should be on delivering flawless creations that provide real value, regardless of the technology behind them.
You pretty much have to be at the cutting edge of generative ai to generate images, etc, but it still may have a shelf life.
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We're not sick of AI. We're sick of it being used for the wrong things.
Because a lot of us are addicts.
I saw an interview with Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) and right behind him was a rack with a Pod Pro amp simulator. I recognized it because I have one, and indeed, you can easily dial in his tone and typical amp sounds. But I'm left wondering how many Sabbath fans noticed that he's using digital modeling these days, or if they can even tell when he started doing that.
People don't like change. It takes a lot of marketing hype to create motion for change to happen. And most people won't even notice it happen. Just like with Sabbath albums.
Messenger-style chatbots abound today. They're everywhere. As well, you have Twitter and Youtube bots that are the grown up version of the irc bots from days gone by.
- Some Internet Wag.
That's the thing, isn't it. AI output is so low-effort that it may as well not exist at all. Just send me the prompt instead, if you're going to do that.
When an entire culture is built on constant pointless pretense, is it really surprising that there is considerable effort put into optimizing it?
I think this goes beyond just consumers. If you listen in on a random companies' strategic planning... Any project with "ai" in its title is likely to be bullschtick.
"AI enabled" is our 2024 "now with electrolytes."
The thing about AI is it reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about speeds and fees.
People care about "1000 songs in your pocket" not "30GB hdd". AI seems to be the "30GB hdd" and people don't always relate AI to how it's going to help them.
How many users know the difference between MFM and RLL hard drives? Now keep progressing that technology wise. People only know and care that they got bigger and faster. Do users care that the file system may or may not be self-defragging?
It saves time.
*shrug*
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