Brands should avoid the term 'AI'. It's turning off customers

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685

AI isn't being marketed to consumers. AI is being marketed to investors. Regardless of whether or not it boosts sales, so long as it keeps driving up the stock price, they'll keep tossing around the word AI.

I know the “AI label” drives me away. It means the product is unreliable and a black box.

The “AI” label also indicates the solution is way over complicated and simpler ways to improve the product have been ignored. For instance, Confluence now has an “AI” chatbot. Search is still substantially worse than grep.

I hope it does. It should be a mark against a clothes dryer that it claims to use AI (unless it actually does, wherein I don't see a possible benefit, and wouldn't buy that anyways). Avoid buying products that pointlessly market themselves as "AI"; vote with your wallet to punish companies for bad behaviour. If they're doing it for the investors, make tacking on garbage buzzwords like "AI" hurt their bottom line.

I think avoid any kinds of buzzwords like AI, high tech, whatever and just focus on what it actually does, which is a lot more impressive.

You can try to wow the customer with a bunch of words but it’s all fluff - and everyone is implementing AI now, and usually these “implementations” are ChatGPT with RAG on the docs or something else that everyone’s done before. What you end up getting is only slightly better than typing in chatgpt.com.

If you’ve managed to get something that solves a problem just explain what it does to solve that.

In the same way, you should stop mentioning mobile, apps, the web, and other past over hyped stuff. That doesn't mean you should stop investing in doing those things well. It just means that you need to focus on the value you deliver to your customers through doing these things well. Everybody has an app. Having an app is not a distinguishing factor any more. In the eighties and nineties, companies slapped the word digital on just about anything. Especially on things that were very much analog. That doesn't mean computers flopped; they are very useful. It's a meaningless distinction to add the digital to a brand.

AI is the same thing. It's a means to an end. You need to be talking about what you deliver with it. Not about how you deliver it.

In the case of CNN that hosts this article, a lot of their content probably is at this point passing through some LLMs at this point. They don't have to advertise that of course. If they do their job right, you barely notice this. Arguably, they should be doing a lot more with AI than they are doing already. The news business is fiercely competitive. Margins are small, and they have to produce more content with fewer people. LLMs can help them do that.

At least when it comes to apps and software, the term "AI powered" automatically gives me the impression of "bloated crapware" these days! But I'm sure sales folks must be making good use of that term to get more projects and revenues from non-technical or less aware managers.

It's also turning me away. Not because I don't like or fear AI. It's because I know, the usages of AI in names of products is a sure sign for incompetent marketing, who doesn't know what to do and who is desperate. I wouldn't buy from marketing that is desperate to sell things after they dictated them.

There is very few things in world that feel as repulsive as the glowing "AI" button in our Jira.

I thought for a few years at Apple keynote presentations, they were saying "machine learning" while Google was saying "AI" hundreds of times. I assumed because they thought "AI" had a privacy-invasion or anti-human connotation to it.

But, then this year they came out with "Apple Intelligence", which people will just see as "AI". So, I guess they finally gave up on that.

> A study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management in June found that describing a product as using AI lowers a customer’s intention to buy it.

For the ones interested in the actual study instead the headline, this is the link for the original paper:

Paper page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...

PDF: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...

I keep an eye on the market of small SaaS businesses for sale. Lately a majority are something like "A simple tool that uses AI to X". I immediately skip past any company like that because that tells me that 1. the company is very young and doesn't have enough history show clear revenue trends, and 2. the product is probably a thin wrapper over ChatGPT and has no moat among a dozen other tools that do the same thing.

Brands increasingly seem to feel nothing but contempt for their customers, so I’m not sure they care. In so many areas customers have no real ability to choose anyway, so what else would commerce look like? There’s no reason to think brands want AI because their customers want it.

Let's play buzzword bingo, shall we?: Organic AI blockchain VR triple-play agile sticky growth-hacking methodology with an addressable market.

Ubiquitous design and UX is better than throwing around nebulous technical cant 99.999% of people don't understand and are partially terrified of taking their jobs. While automating the navigation of ambiguous requests and delivering more open results with less exhaustive and tedious coding is cool, these features delivered to users have to provide useful advantages to be essential or they're just going to come off as "me too" bandwagon jumping.

"Self-hosted", "open architecture", "cloud optional" are terms I like to see but only because I'm weirdo who tinkers with things sometimes but don't necessarily want to spend all of my time fixing or supporting fragile hacks.

Wish it would start turning off investors so we can see other kinds of innovation.

This article is very forgiving towards tech companies, suggesting that users are techno phobic and the solution is to remove such labels.

My perspective: consumers have seen new tech emerge a thousand times and are favoring reliability instead of the flavor of the month new tech, especially when it was designed to sell instead, not to solve real problems.

This seems just like TVs, where more people long for dumber TVs with quality display - they are faster and more reliable than what the market of smart TVs is providing.

The simple truth is that for 99% of cases right now, you putting AI in your product means you are lazy. Your product team either has no idea or no control over your frothing execs. Your product will be outdated, replaced, or entirely canceled in 6-12 months and there's no reason I should build anything on top of it, or learn about it more. You are pretending to be a master of a technology your company barely understands and you give off big clown energy.

The advertisements for co-pilot during the Olympics were laughably bad. An attempt at the sentimental and way overplayed trope of people using search/apps interwoven with touching life moments. In this one though, it was all a bunch of sports related achievements they had to really stretch to tie back to co-pilot. Someone using it to make a chart tracking heart rate - like I'd put any health data in that thing.

Then you have Google writing letters for your children or showing how their camera AI integrations can help you live a lie. Frankly I'm glad to see data showing consumers are turned off.

Oh! And then for the executives they have Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba talking about data security and productivity.

Airports are a bellweather. This drives trends/investors/CEOs/middle managers. Living close to a large airport on a business city it was always

- VMware - Azure - IBM etc

Now-a-days

- Get your employees co-pilot assisted Intel/Windows/etc to boost productivity

AI drives me away because I don't want to support the automation of creative tasks. Even if the application isn't replacing creative people, I don't want to support any of it. To hell with AI!

It seems likely that if you can present a problem that customers have and a solution involving AI you’ll get a better response. It needs to be a real problem and the solution needs to be a better solution, though.

Depends on who your customers are. In B2B anything that mentions “AI” still sells like hot cakes, especially enterprises where the person who buys (ie signs the contract) isn’t the person who uses the product.

We’re currently doing a bunch of “AI at the Edge” projects, even though it’s hardly justified (“edge” in this case is just an on-prem datacenter), but you need to use buzzwords like these to convince executives.

Only some of the market is end users. The rest is businesses looking to replace headcount and they don't care what users think.

The thing is, I want a great product. Sometimes what I am looking for is a thing that involves LLMS, but most of the time what I hear is: telephones home and there is no way to stop it — and it probably doesn't even work half decent. Or the inclusion of the term AI is so ridiculous that you know nobody with reason works at that company.

90% of AI companies are just thin layers on top of an LLM, sometimes useful but they have all the problems LLM have (I will explain)

For existing companies with AI features: more useful but mostly LLM bolted on with the same use cases. They can improve the product if used right. But for me it’s mostly often just a gimmick.

The problem with LLMs: They mostly generate stuff they have seen and are bad as truly new stuff. They make mistakes You need to put time and energy in the review it.

For stuff that transforms data it’s useful. Like rewriting a piece of text.

It’s also useful for search queries on the corpus the LLM is trained on.

It’s good at pattern recognition and lastly: human like voice interfaces.

But for generating novel stuff: good luck reviewing it.

People who just blindly copy paste the output of an LLM: that’s quite dangerous and potentially plain wrong.

At least that’s my experience.

Same happen to crypto.

I'm an huge crypto enthusiast, but whenever I see the term "crypto" being used somewhere I just cringe.

For founders chasing enterprise deals, a small piece of advice. In the Fortune 500s LLM chat UIs provided a canvas to which lawyers, privacy and procurement people painted all of their nightmares. So slapping AI on your product might help a little with investors but it might also slow down your first enterprise deal by a year.

A conference I helped organise had a lot of “AI” and “LLM” submissions. We had a blanket rule of ignoring all of them since they mostly sucked anyway.

Meanwhile another conference I am going to has several “machine learning” talks which could have been titled something more informative like “image analysis” or “regression modelling”.

When I think of "AI" as a feature, I think

* Nondeterministic * Untrustworthy * Uncertain * Marketing buzzword * Gimmick * Probably requires an external service or expensive hardware * Probably collecting my data

If other people generally have the same perception, I'm not surprised it would drive people away.

They should avoid actually deploying the massively invasive and power hungry anti-feature as well

Kinda hilarious seeing how hard people went to add "AI" to pretty much everything.

As a journalist, I would really wish to see a study saying that headlines like the one CNN used on this article drive readers away. I hate the “this generic thing you have to discover by reading past the first paragraph” trend so much.

As a customer, and a developer, every time I see AI as a feature in product marketing I immediately think bullshit hype train. All other merchandising is ignored.

If that’s all you have in your sales pitch then you are failing.

But isn't this a good thing? For the customers. It makes it easier for us to avoid hype based products and look for something that's actually useful to us...

By all means, please use "AI" everywhere.

It's not about whether AI signals if the quality is bad or good. It's that for most people they see 'AI' and they have no idea what that actually means.

Sell benefits not features.

Marketing people is trying to shovel AI in everything in the sense of AI as in video games not as in AI as in General AI. It's the same as the Smart products era.

I can't be the only one that actively avoid any YT videos, articles, apps etc when I see AI generated art.

> A study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management

Haha. So they made a splash talking about AI. Well played.

because they tacked it on! If the product is carefully considered tech built from the ground up using AI or ML Those products would not drive people away. Now things that worked like search on google and social media sites is so bloated and inconsistent that your grandma would notice while touting AI powered search.

Because of the fAItigue the mentioning of AI will go away, but the orweillian precrAIme is here to stay.

Who would have thought. Don't believe the hype, especially if you have skin in the game.

every Wed I have a meeting with MS. I've started tallying every time co-pilot/AI/Chat-GPT is mentions. week before last its was 100 times in 34 mins, last week it was about 15 times. (not) looking forward to what this week will be.

I was recently at a non-AI security conference and was passing through a hallway. Heard the term AI like 10 times in 10 minutes.

Everytime that happens, I go back to that meme that got created after Google's IO when Sundar Pichai said "ai, ai, ai..." like 113 times.

This is a golden age of machine learning in a lot of ways: Karpathy and others like him will teach you how to do magical things every bit as well as the most elite experts via YouTube, Lambda Labs and others will rent you the same kinds of clusters used by the most elite experts if not quite at brute force money furnace scale, Meta will give you the same code and weights they use in production, Huggingface has 10 trillion token datasets of the highest quality hosted, Anyscale and others have open sourced infrastructure that will empower staggering scale for even moderately well-resourced builders.

This should represent a Cambrian Explosion of delightful innovation on par with anything that followed the emergence of the personal computer, or the web, or the smartphone. And there is in fact a ton of amazingly cool stuff happening under the tidal wave of shitty monetization and financialization.

But the robber barons and the hustlers and the opportunists have gone for the jugular on how quickly and completely this event can be politicized (the lobbying and laws and the speed and ruthlessness around them are an embarrassment), how quickly it can be “monetized” via LLM spam and pump-and-dump Mag7 cap manipulation, and how directly it can be converted into a minimum cost offshore customer servicing model-style aspirations where consumers get a broken chat bot instead of a person while simultaneously facing pressure, real or perceived, that their job is about to be replaced by some inferior “agent” that isn’t done.

Machine learning is an amazing technology that should be strictly delightful in the hands of people who live to build awesome things that make people happy and prosperous and safe. “AI” has come to mean LLM spam, Thiel/Altman-style TESCREAL fascist politics, a massive surge in ubiquitous digital surveillance (which somehow still had headroom), and the next turn of the crank on the enshitification of modern life courtesy of the Battery Club.

The socially useful and technically exciting future of AI is just waiting on the fall of the “AI” people. It’s so close.

It is nothing new. It is a nature of the economic models. We live in the bubble. The connection with reality is eroding progressively. You look at the information cycle you see opportunity, growth, futurism, promises, and social networks silos amplify what they find profitable. In reality: Economic instability, layoffs, wars, eroding of democracy everywhere, progressive government control, poverty, bad infrastructure, etc. Soon the reality will catch with tech bros and investors. Things are inflated to the brink. In this situation, AI marketing looks like a bad joke. ML is useful and applicable in a lot of use cases. But consumer AI fails time and time again to deliver the promised productivity boost and is expensive. So...

> Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management

This seems more relevant to physical consumer goods

I share the sentiment but I don’t think this is tech related.

For wiw, everything I used before on my Android now has an AI in it’s name(or screenshot) on PlayStore. So:

* The AI Browser

* AI note taking app

* AI photo gallery

* AI habit tracker

* AI budget planner

* AI music player

* AI bank

* AI hike planner

* AI icon pack(wtf?!)

* AI launcher

* AI camera

* AI news

* AI PDF reader

* AI comics viewer

* AI Maps

* AI food delivery

* AI shopping experience

* AI calorie tracker

* AI video editor

* AI backup

* AI share

* AI Authenticator(??)

* AI partner

* AI RoboAdviser(?)

* AI Wallpapers

* AI package tracker(?!)

* AI health tracker

And plenty other things I am forgetting. Even things that already had AI before are now new AI. This is getting out of hand.

What?! You mean that my company's half-baked quickly-on-the-bandwagon AI for AI's sake strategy might backfire? Shocking!

Seriously though, it seems AI is being marketed towards investors, and that wherever it was included in a product it will be just to say it's on the product roadmap. If you're long enough in the game like myself you get to recognize these hype bubbles (CORBA anyone?) that claim to be about to take over the world and then fizzle out.

AI has sadly become the new blockchain. Over hyped and consuming way to much power, attention and manpower for what it is with very little benefits to mankind.

I guess that is what Tech is nowadays.

So yes when I see 'AI' mentioned in products I shake my head before looking at details. Case in point: iOS 18.1 Beta. The Great Apple Intelligence. It does nothing. Just... you won't even notice it.

Nice try, competitors

AI = blockchain 2.0

, journo terrified of AI says.

> said Dogan Gursoy, one of the study’s authors and the Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of hospitality business management at Washington State University

The irony… I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor.

Oh well, it was good while it lasted. But now we need a brand new hype to replace the malfunctioning AI neon sign. Maybe "neural meta computing", or "quantum hyper reasoners"?

You see, a calm, factual, truthful and informed conversation of different technologies actual maturity, merrits and risks is in nobody's interest. /s

No one is dropping the term AI. There's only one culprit in all this: McKinsey. They are never the first to write the research, but when they do everyone follows.

> McKinsey research estimates that gen AI could add to the economy between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually while increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent.

When McKinsey releases a report, all product managers will present it in the next marketing slide and the ad budget will follow. If it fails to materialize, it's never their fault of course. The leader in market research is to blame.

Google has no business advertising Gemini on TV. Like who is the target really? But an enterprise not embracing AI after the biggest Market Research firm says it's the future? I'm putting my money on Long Island Ice Tea AI next.

[0]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...