76 replies
14h27m
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.
74 replies
13h16m
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.
24 replies
12h47m
It seems there's also a "Coca Cola distinguished professor of marketing" and a "Yahoo! chair of information systems technology" too.
It's gross
9 replies
10h48m
A couple of years ago the University of Cape Town had a property called the "Shell Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building".
But nowadays only the weathered shadows on the facade remain where the letters "Shell" once were mounted.
8 replies
10h19m
Western Australia announced a "Greentech Hub" for environmental technology and innovation, sponsored by Chevron [0].
Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations. The irony is almost overwhelming.
As usual, nothing has been heard from the Greentech Hub since it was announced by the relevant minister almost a year ago. Which is fine, because the entire point of the thing was to have it announced by the relevant minister.
It's all very Yes Minister / Utopia, and we all see straight through it.
[0] https://startupnews.com.au/news/minister-dawson-announces-ne...
4 replies
9h59m
Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations. The irony is almost overwhelming.
Yea, but that would just make some other player take their place. The game-theoretic choice seems to be to keep doing what they are doing, while allocating some of that dirty money towards research in green tech.
1 replies
8h41m
Ok but what if I said: we shouldn't arrest cartel hitmen, because that would just make some other murderer take their place. The game-theoretic choice seems to be to keep doing what they are doing, while allocating some of that dirty money towards research in nonviolent conflict management?
0 replies
7h37m
Believe it or not, law enforcement agencies actually do that, more or less every day, in every country. There is value in having crime organised, predictable, somewhat circumscribed, and controlled by people you can communicate with and influence to a degree.
Real life is rarely binary.
0 replies
9h6m
I think you meant "towards marketing claiming green tech".
0 replies
9h37m
Presumably one would shut them down by making their cost externalizations illegal, not by specifically dismantling the single company.
0 replies
9h25m
Aren’t fossil fuels from plants and good for plant life ? I mean plants breath in co2 and out o2. Higher co2 levels could probably turn deserts green.
0 replies
8h55m
Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations.
The catastrophic levels of human deaths resulting from food shortages and supply chain disruption (and basically everything supporting civilization) would surely lower global CO2 emissions!
0 replies
10h8m
And to think Australia was basically the first major country to try to introduce a carbon tax back in the Julia Gillard days. Now, it looks more like the last major country still resisting any change, no matter how small, to the oil-fueled economy, by spinning words and actions to the extreme in order to look "green" while splurging in oil like Texans gushers in the early 1900's.
6 replies
12h28m
While I imagine it just means they sponsored the academic institution, likely a good thing, but there's something unshakeably "idiocracy"-flavored dystopian about fast food product placement on professors.
5 replies
10h58m
It turns from Idiocracy-flavored comedy-dystopian into bona fide dystopian rather quickly once you dig into what a multinational corporation does around and besides the product they're recognized for. "Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of hospitality business management" may sound funny, but if I ever heard about McDonald's Professor of Genetics, or Disney's Professor of Applied Robotics, I'd start getting worried.
(In other words, "Continuum" vibes. An underrated Canadian sci-fi show featuring "Corporate Congress" and a bunch of luxury brands of today turning into serious industrial/energy/medical players under 50 years from now.)
4 replies
10h15m
Disney's Professor of Applied Robotics
Disney's robotics are legit though, they do a lot of work and research in that area
2 replies
9h10m
That's precisely my point. Disney may still be mostly a kids' brand, but I bet their robotics department would hold its own if corporate decided to enter heavy industry or military robotics markets. The brand may seem like a joke, but the expertise isn't.
1 replies
8h34m
I think the reply was to point out that people respect disney robotics. I bet more people know about disney robotics than boston dynamics.
I think it is a "you"-thing thinking others also devalue disney because "kid movies" or some other property. There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds. Or marketing by coke.
Innovation and imagineering (cough, largely robotics) are synonymous with the image of disney.
0 replies
3h12m
Innovation and imagineering (cough, largely robotics) are synonymous with the image of disney.
Maybe it's' indeed a "me" problem, but I only vaguely know about "imagineering" thing via HN; it's not something I think I'd stumbled on otherwise. As far as I can tell, for most people I know, Disney is the kids programming producer that often makes stuff adults enjoy just as much, if not more, than kids, plus the company that took over Star Wars. A subset of them is also aware that the House of Mouse has a scary legal department.
There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds.
McDonald's must be a powerhouse in logistics and process engineering - and in case of the latter, it's not a big leap from making food to making drugs or advanced materials. I know a little bit about adjacent fields from the software side; the food processing plant and a chemical manufacturing plant use pretty much the same tools and processes.
0 replies
9h27m
I think they had a skunkworks spin-off out in a Connecticut suburb working on hyper-feminine, hyper-realistic androids at some point.
4 replies
12h17m
In sports this happens all the time. I guess it was only a matter of time before it hit education and professors.
Ex.
The Poulan/Weedeater Independence Bowl
Guaranteed Rate Field
Smoothie King Center
And my fav: Bargain Booze Stadium
3 replies
11h23m
These are all things not people
2 replies
10h37m
Sports teams are named by and/or owned by brands too.
0 replies
10h11m
And that brand naming also sounds terrible. Candlestick Park or Comesky Park is a way better name than Levi's Stadium or Gauranteed Rate Field, for eff's sake.
0 replies
51m
Entire leagues as well.
The Barclay Card English Premier League comes to mind.
0 replies
9h24m
Coca-Cola Professor of Marketing seems fitting though - Coca-Cola is probably one of the most capable marketing organizations the planet has ever seen.
0 replies
10h40m
There was a post a TechCrunch article posted here a couple of months ago referring to the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT. This probably happens in other fields too, but every time I've seen one of these brand-deal titles has been in an AI related article.
20 replies
12h19m
The ridiculousness lies entirely on the US having sponsored professors.
10 replies
12h11m
Endowed professorships are common globally.
They have been common for at least 1,000 years. Much much longer than that but "a millennium" is enough to get my point across.
Sometimes it seems as though half of the biomedical professorships in Europe are funded by Merck and Roche.
Every single philosopher at Plato's Academy and the Lyceum was "sponsored" by wealthy merchants and politicians, the corporations and billionaires of that era.
7 replies
11h38m
Can you give any example of an academic title being defaced by an ad placement? I doubt there was any "Zorba's Olive Oil Philosopher" in Plato's Academy.
4 replies
10h11m
That’s only because you don’t recognize the old brand names/people, not because the phenomenon is new.
2 replies
9h36m
So you can't give an example then?
0 replies
4h58m
Roche-Professor für Infektionsimmunologie
0 replies
6h52m
Ah, HN rate limiting.
A classic example would be folks sponsored by the Medici’s or their numerous competitors.
Or, for example, the numerous (often controversial) concessions Michelangelo had to make for the church. Which frankly, come across a bit like the Simpsons poking fun at Fox all the time. Albeit, more classically artistic of course.
0 replies
9h3m
No wonder Diogenes was looking for an honest man
0 replies
4h58m
Roche-Professor für Infektionsimmunologie at Basel.
Credit Suisse Asset Management (Schweiz) AG-Professur für Distributed Ledger Technology/Fintech
Cambridge had a BP Professor of Chemistry until 2019 when BP stopped paying.
Their price list is online: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/endowin...
Are three examples sufficient? Taco Bell is a more ethical and apt supporter of higher education than BP, Credit Suisse, or Roche, lol.
0 replies
8h16m
UC San Diego was the first convenient list of endowed positions I found, but it's hardly unique:
ASML Endowed Chair in Advanced Optical Technologies
Callaway Golf Chair in Structural Mechanics
Chugai Pharmaceutical Chair in Cancer
Ericsson Chair in Wireless Communications Access Techniques
Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Embedded Microsystems
Etc, etc.
1 replies
9h7m
Considering most European countries have universal healthcare the pharmaceutical industry is just an arm of the government.
0 replies
8h42m
That's not how any of this works. Even the UK, which does do direct provision, doesn't have state pharma manufacturing. Most European countries have a sort of hybrid approach of universal insurance but private regulated providers.
Novo Nordisk is not part of the state of Denmark.
8 replies
11h48m
Historically lots of academics were sponsored by the nobility, right? Say what you will about Taco Bell, I’ll take their sponsorship over a bunch of pretentious thugs and hereditary gangsters.
3 replies
11h15m
Taco Bell is not nobility. Nobility = warriors
2 replies
10h55m
1000 years of English aristocracy disagrees: nobility = landowners
0 replies
10h47m
Not an especially precise or traditional equality.
Most, but not all, noble and titled aristocracy had a landowner in the family, young aristocrats with older siblings would rarely inherit the land titles.
On the flip, relatively few of the landowners were part of the nobility. Many of the grand landowners were, of course, but certainly once the merchant class started earning serious coin and commissioning all the best gardens on large estate they purchased from poor nobles, well, that relationship started to fall away.
0 replies
36m
The English aristocracy might have disagreed 1000 years ago, but nobody cares what they thought because the French (Normans, mostly) would shortly prune those noble family trees quite aggressively.
1 replies
11h22m
Going out on a limb and say that’s not a majority opinion.
0 replies
4h35m
Possibly, people romanticize the gangsters of the last century already, and they don’t even have the benefit of a thousand years of propaganda.
0 replies
10h8m
pretentious thugs
Consider: the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Coca-Cola death squads, Nestle's reliance on slave labor for cocoa (through a scheme of indirection that is common among other companies), etc.
There's plenty of thuggery in the dealings of megacorps, and plenty of pretension in the sponsorship of a professorship by such a corporation
0 replies
11h9m
He just happens to prefer Taco shaped diagrams.
10 replies
13h4m
In the future, every university chair is sponsored by Taco Bell.
6 replies
10h47m
Except when they visit Europe for a conference, in which case it is Pizza Hut, because Taco Bell is not as well-established there.
5 replies
10h22m
Who eats there in Europe? Its mcdonalds of pizzas, the worst quality on the market, in this case a product that has little in common even in appearance with traditional pizza, more like hearthy focaccia. Less good, less healthy.
Maybe good for late night drunks and stoners with nothing else still opened, but I know literally nobody who ever even mentioned eating there.
2 replies
8h35m
> Its mcdonalds of pizzas
A massive commercial success, with tens of thousands of restaurants worldwide and hundreds of thousands of employees?
1 replies
5h0m
Yeah, I know all this, but my question still stands - who apart from desperate with lack of other choice would ever decide to eat there? I get they end up with tons of customers, just that either people I know are ashamed of going there to even mention it (way more than mcdonalds) or I just don't know anybody who ever went there.
Folks I know end up in MCDs all the time when partying, not much else open around midnight, even kebabs close at 10-10:30pm where I live.
0 replies
4h13m
At least in my area, Pizza Hut's target market is families.
They're not trying to be the kind of posh place you'd go for an important business meeting, or with a date you wanted to impress. It's a bit more raucous - if your kids are a bit excitable they won't be spoiling the experience for the other diners.
The food quality is fine - it's not haute cuisine but it's easy to make pizza taste great because it's packed with great tasting melted cheese and pepperoni and tomato sauce.
If you don't know any people who go there it's probably because you don't know many people organising birthday parties for 13 year olds.
0 replies
9h55m
They are referencing the 1993 movie Demolition Man
0 replies
9h56m
the worst quality on the market
not a big fan of Pizza Hut, but believe me: there's much worse.
1 replies
11h38m
And you get graded on a Bell curve
0 replies
10h29m
The Doritos® Locos Taco curve.
0 replies
11h11m
And every politician sponsored by Carls Junior
3 replies
10h20m
The academic path is tempting for many. The myth is that you get to spend all day in research and working with ideas. The truth is, a huge amount of time is spent writing grants and funding proposals. It's a whole industry and researchers and scientists at well-known institutions are expected to bring in a steady stream of funding, including funding their own positions. Historically that has been through foundations and government sources (which are massive). It's entirely unsurprising that brands have gotten involved.
2 replies
9h26m
The Taco Bell professorship is an endowed chair, not something you apply for. It’s paid for by Taco Bell as a gift to the university, then the university awards it as part of a recruitment (or retention) process for senior professors. It means the professor gets a nice salary and research stipend that is independent from the rest of the school, and can live the life of research and thinking.
1 replies
8h27m
It is a different path through the same system. Your description is the exact language that Yum! Brands, Inc. is hoping people will use. It softens the crass branding of academic projects and positions the effort as altruistic. The American academic environment is filled with these obfuscations.
0 replies
4h20m
What do you think is being obfuscated? It’s normal to give money so you can name stuff.
1 replies
10h4m
A chair he holds since the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.
0 replies
10h1m
Excellent reference.
1 replies
12h40m
In Australia we have a saying like "they got their driving license in a Wheaties packet". Wheaties being a breakfast cereal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheaties
It's not a compliment. ;)
So a "Taco Bell professor" sounds like a similar kind of thing, except it's real.
0 replies
11h56m
"Distinguished" makes the difference. ;)
1 replies
12h19m
It really does read like a line from Idiocracy.
0 replies
10h56m
I can imagine the silk gowns being covered in brand logos.
0 replies
12h15m
Wait until you see the cross promotion: the Dogan Super QuesadillAI.
0 replies
10h36m
I mean it worked. Read this comment, was hungry, decided to order some tacos. Didn't even have to click the link. lol
Also Taco Bell Distinguished Professor at.. WSU. yup that tracks
0 replies
12h1m
"Study authors should avoid the term 'Taco Bell'. It's turning off readers."
I'm not sure if it's worse than 'AI distinguished professor' though.
0 replies
9h26m
Imagine the family gatherings. "How's our little distinguished Taco Bell professor?"
Jokes aside, one does not get to pick their academic sponsors or reject funding, and no offence intended to the guy's obvious expertise.
It reminds me of the 100 Thieves Totino's Fortnite training room.
0 replies
11h43m
Publish mas
0 replies
10h59m
Extra ironic that Costco HQ is in WA as well. Feels like we’re one step away from Costco University where distinguished Taco Bell professors would dole out their wisdom about AI.
0 replies
9h52m
> I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor
Reminds me of the scene from the movie Idiocracy where the main character's lawyer said he went to Costco Law School[1] and that he was lucky since his dad pulled some strings to get him in.
19 replies
11h15m
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.
13 replies
11h6m
Having an app is not a distinguishing factor any more.
Having an app is "fuck you, i don't want to install another app" these days...
6 replies
10h50m
It has been for decades. Also, people don’t know what the hell they want or are talking about - so often people tell me they have no apps on their phone, they don’t like apps, they’re bad and wrong - and then I see they’ve got Facebook, instagram, 10 candy crush clones, etc. “what about those?” “Those aren’t apps. Those are things.”
My mother has total disdain for “social media users” yet spends six hours a day on Facebook. She doesn’t see it as social media. “It’s more of a virtual parlour”
So yeah. People don’t know what the hell they want or are talking about.
3 replies
7h19m
has total disdain for “social media users”
What's social media today anyway? I've been told the likes of whatsapp or discord are also social media. But they're just chat apps to me because you use them to chat with other people and they don't have automated systems that cram cat pictures down your throat.
2 replies
7h5m
and they don't have automated systems that cram cat pictures down your throat.
Yes they do. It is your aunt who is crazy about cats. Nearly every family has one.
1 replies
5h45m
It’s a crazy aunt on WhatsApp, it’s not an engagement algorithm. Does your Facebook even show you your aunts posts? I have a feeling it’s stopped showing friends and relatives for me ages ago.
0 replies
3h12m
Sorry that was just a tongue in cheek joke.
1 replies
10h13m
They know what they want, just not what they’re talking about.
0 replies
10h10m
Or they know what they want, and what they’re talking about - in the sense of denial and projection anyway.
5 replies
10h18m
I prefer apps and desktop apps when they are available. They feel and work nicer mostly than web based. But we live more and more in a browser world and there is less and less choice and I understand I must move with the times.
2 replies
9h43m
They feel and work nicer mostly than web based.
The "apps" i'm talking about are just the web site packed into a crap and resource hungry web view...
1 replies
8h32m
And requires access to my contacts for some reason.
0 replies
8h28m
Most of the time it's just incompetence, they import the 1823 js libraries and ask for all the permissions their libraries could use in that corner case that happens once every 1760 years.
0 replies
7h8m
I prefer apps when they work mostly offline and don't try to send my private data to various third parties. I tend to prefer the browser which allows me to control a little bit more what it does for everything else.
0 replies
10h13m
But we live more and more in a browser world and there is less and less choice and I understand I must move with the times.
Wow. Has everything gone full circle again already? I thought we were all still complaining about the death of the web and the app-ocracy.
1 replies
10h9m
I agree, and it's probably what the article is about. These terms have meaning for a little while, then they get abused (see your "digital" example), than they become meaningless and even sound antiquated.
I agree with a lot of the siblings though: "AI" features themselves are so often seemingly just pushed on users, and it doesn't look like they were thought through, well implemented or tested.
My main annoyance with this these days is that absolutely every app and device seems to have decided they need to push an "assistant" on me. I personally hate the assistant UX, and I wish I didn't have to close so many banners for apps to leave me alone with that. I get that they're trying to show their investors that their "AI features" get "engagement", but it seems... desperate.
Even if they don't call it "AI", but just by the value it supposedly provides (e.g. "assistant"), it still annoys me quite a bit. I wonder how other consumers (especially non-technical people) feel about that part. TFA doesn't really seem to go into it.
0 replies
8h42m
The article is based on: we did some stats on ads and sales of various brands and found that certain words impacted sales negatively in last quarter. That's it.
0 replies
11h5m
i get what you are tryig to say, but i guess what OP meant was if every company ties up AI in their product just because they are calling Chat GPT API in the backend, then every product is essentially the same.
i guess with time developers will also get to make and train inhouse AI models if in future it gets more affordable
0 replies
8h20m
My air conditioner's instruction manual had a whole "we have an app!" thing on it. I installed it for funsies. I noticed pretty quickly that there was no button for changing the temperature setting. All you can do is turn the thing on or off. Turns out, there's a button for "advanced settings" that takes you to a webpage. On that webpage, you have to log in again, but once you do, you can change temperature, create timers and do all kinds of things. Completely insane design. I bet they built out the webapp first, then some PM type went in and was like "no, we need an app" and forced them to build a "native app". Then they ran out of time and just put a link to the website in the app.
0 replies
6h33m
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.
This is true, but AI is new enough tech that it is reasonable to say "this thing wasn't possible to build three years ago, now it is possible to build, and we built it!". That is definitely a good pitch to investors, and in some cases, directly to customers.
That is not something you can say about mobile apps - like you said, it's not a distinguishing factor any more. But it is a factor for AI, in some situations.
11 replies
6h29m
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.
3 replies
6h22m
Yeah, for example, nerdwallet did an AI search/ask chat GPT about finances feature. I believe that not a single customer asked for their budgeting software to have an AI chatbot.
2 replies
6h20m
But how else would they stamp an AI label to their product? Bolt a chatbot onto it, say you are AI-powered, and profit!
0 replies
4h40m
I argue the main issue is that many companies have invested significant resources in poorly assessed, designed, and planned AI implementations, rather than focusing on simpler, achievable, and impactful solutions [1]
[1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2024/06/easy-wins-for-generative-a...
0 replies
5h32m
It's even worse than that. It's "bolt a chatbot on to your product, force it into people's workflow against their will, claim huge usage numbers on your quarterly result calls, stock price goes up".
Not profits, just stock price. The evidence that anybody who isn't "selling shovels" has made any significant money yet with AI remains thin.
I can't remember if it was Google or Facebook, but in the last earnings season one of them claimed directly that AI has improved their advertising revenue, but the improvement was not terribly out of line from what these companies have been doing for a while (not like suddenly they popped out a revenue triple, it was not obviously out of line with their normal reporting), and I wouldn't be surprised they were doing exactly what I said in my first paragraph. I did not find their claim terribly compelling, even if it was completely true and not just a sop to the stock market. Nobody else is even claiming that AI has increased profits.
I'm sure there's some startups with some profits, maybe even very exciting amounts of profit for a startup, but nothing that would move the needle for established companies. In fact we seem to already be in the consolidation phase for the industry, the startups are starting to go under. If we use that as a timer for where we are in the hype cycle, this is underperforming compared to other bubbles; at this point in the dot com crash, while the sector was heavily overinvested it was also quite obvious to a calm observer not panicking about their portfolio that there was definitely a there there, it just wasn't ready to sustain that much investment. There is so far a lot less there there with AI.
This hype is going to prove disastrous for the entire technology, I fear. If it was treated as a more normal technology, it would improve, it would be experimented with, companies would learn how to use it, failures would be shaken out and successes doubled down on, and in 3-10 years it would be a healthy industry making reliable, good money with a bright future for growth. But the way the stock market went absolutely ape shit, now the bar is, in roughly 6-12 months if AI has not quintupled the profit margin of all of the already-largest companies on Earth, it is a failure, and so are those companies. We've got a lot of people now with all the incentives in the world to blatently lie about their progress because as soon as they are truthful they become personally bankrupt as their stock options tank. Not because of any particular aspect of AI, except that it wasn't a miracle "drop it into any process instantly see quintupled profits", and I'm not inclined to be too annoyed at any technology for failing to be that. And it could take AI down with it. Again. I'd expect the resulting "AI winter" to be relatively short this time because the technology really is becoming promising, but the medium-term prospects for the tech are probably a lot dimmer than they theoretically should be because of this disproportionate frenzy.
2 replies
5h31m
If anyone from JetBrains is reading this thread, please take the above to heart. I have yet to have any devs in my circle make the comment that "the JetBrains AI assistant really saved me time" but I've heard more than once about how distracting (and generally incorrect) its guesses are.
I'd really rather have time invested in making the memory footprint smaller again.
1 replies
3h0m
JetBrains products are such a dichotomy. The core software is outstanding but for years now I've found almost every update to be net negative. They rarely add new features that I find useful and they spend a lot of time adding useless stuff that adds clutter and hurts performance, or they change existing features for no apparent reason.
0 replies
47m
They probably put product people in charge.
Which is an incredibly misguided idea specifically in the context of a developer IDE... I mean I do understand the rationale and value for the job in other contexts. Not so much in this one though.
0 replies
5h39m
What's worse is companies replacing their search with an AI chat bot. I noticed that on Amazon the other day—where there used to be a feature where you could search all the Q&As and all the reviews for a product, there's now a chatbot that seems to just be ChatGPT with the product description given as context (if you poke at it you can get it to talk about itself as ChatGPT, so I don't think it's an Amazon model). Completely worthless.
There's still a search for reviews, but I can't find one for Q&A or for both together.
0 replies
50m
I for one love well implemented AI features. Take immich search for example. No cloud connection, and let's you search for pictures in your library by describing it i.e. a kid with a red jacket on a bicycle... And you get the picture you made, but didn't know exactly when etc.
Very rare example though. As a matter of fact, I couldn't name another one right now.
0 replies
3h46m
Because decisionmakers literally think that potential customers who are comparing products side by side look at whether ProductA has a tick in the "AI" column and ProductB doesn't, so A must be better. I think it's as simple as that. They cater to the feature-matrix thing, they get a win for their yearly review because they "implemented AI". A good search makes users love your product. But that doesn't show up in a feature matrix, nor is it a great review bullet point to have "improved the search somewhat".
0 replies
5h55m
It will never stop being remarkable to me the sheer volume of enterprises of all scales, from the smallest startups to the most massive titans of our industry, all trip over and fall on their faces when it comes to search. A good search feature can turn a great product into an amazing product, and yet seemingly in every product, it is at best, an afterthought. Even Google which forged it's position in the market today off the back of just doing one thing, search, really, really well, has entirely lost it's way and utterly destroyed it's search product on the altar of profit. And now it too is following suit deploying AI as a half-assed solution for that situation.
10 replies
15h23m
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.
4 replies
14h5m
you don't realize it, but you are suggesting bog standard marketing advice: "Customers don't buy features, they buy benefits. You need to point out how your product benefits the customer." Around here that would correspond to "addressing pain points"
"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole." - Ted Levitt HBS
2 replies
8h17m
I guess even big corps like Microsoft need this reminder. GitHub's front page says "The world’s leading AI-powered developer platform."
1 replies
4h56m
They probably ran A/B test and this wording led to increased registrations rate.
Not sure why everyone instantly assumes product teams are not aware of marketings basics. It is consumers driving how the products evolve, not the other way around.
0 replies
2h38m
I think that's a very forgiving perspective.
Product teams are often wrong, and A/B tests can lead to inferior long term solutions.
As always, it's best to criticize the idea, not the people.
0 replies
3h57m
"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole."
Nah, speaking for plenty of guys, I'd say we want the drill. Maybe with an impact hammer too, of we can afford it. :)
2 replies
14h11m
Yeah, it's the same way that ".com" or "online" used to be buzzwords too, that nowadays just feel kind of cheap. If most things have AI, then simply saying you have AI doesn't really mean much. Sell the solution, not the technology, etc.
1 replies
13h43m
Reminds me of ancient motels (with signage that probably hasn't been updated in decades) that proudly announce that their rooms are air conditioned and have color tv. Not that those aren't nice to have, but they are pretty much expected today.
0 replies
12h33m
The Kano Model in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model
1 replies
12h2m
which is a lot more impressive.
Ah, well, there you run into a problem. Generally consumer ‘AI’ is pointless, and is there only because the markets are (or at least were; there are some indications that this may be ending) fixated on AI.
0 replies
10h7m
There may well be valid applications of consumer AI, but I don't think we've seen any good ones yet. Most consumer products currently clearly use AI as a marketing buzzword.
Most blatant example I've seen is Logitech's AI mouse.
10 replies
7h20m
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.
9 replies
6h49m
What's the problem with AI washing machines?
It analyses the laundry type and size to inform itself on how much detergent to use, analyses the laundry during the wash to know when it is clean enough, monitors the moisture level in the clothes to know when the drying is finished.. it's as if a person is there micromanaging the washing machine.. how is that not an artificial agent?
6 replies
6h46m
Exactly zero of that is AI. You've described an extremely basic control loop with a few simple sensors, a lookup table, and some if-then statements.
3 replies
6h39m
That might be how you would implement it, are you refusing to concede that Samsung could have implemented it better than your strawman implementation?
What is your standard for intelligence?
My washing machine is already better at doing laundry than I am (even if I was in total control of a machine with identical capabilities), why is that not good enough for you?
2 replies
5h43m
I think the point was that every new washing machine already does these things (measures how much detergent to use, checks when the water is clean enough etc.) without any AI. It’s not a very difficult problem domain.
0 replies
4h46m
We may concede that it could be difficult from an engineering/sensors perspective, but the software side should be about as easy as a traffic light
0 replies
4h22m
Honestly those new smart washing machines with large graphic LCD displays full off sensors to detect the water quality, detergent quantity, how soiled the wash is, etc, are annoying me to hell an back with their constant nagging.
"Oh sorry, your drum is a little light , consider putting more clothes in to save the environment"
I throw another towel in.
"Oh shucks, drum weight overload, consider removing some clothes from the wash"
The problem with the new ones is that they're too smart for their own good and instead of using their smarts to make my life easier (I don't know what can be easier than the old washing machines where you throw the was inside, with the detergent, turn the program knob and push start, and why we need smart ones) they instead use their smarts to be annoying and require more user input and more steps just to fucking wash clothes.
0 replies
6h14m
Tangentially, we used to have the term "smart" for this. It slowly faded as it became redundant, but now everything is suddenly AI.
0 replies
6h1m
It’s not an LLM (and if it is, what a waste) but it is a limited scope AI of the sort used to control units in a classic RTS.
0 replies
6h21m
Come on man, I know the majority of the time HN can fall into the dropbox launch "I can set that up myself easily" mindset, but this goes all the way back to the other direction. People do not need an AI to "analyse the laundry type and size to inform itself on how much detergent to use", just press a couple buttons. If this is where people's imaginations are going with AI then no wonder some people look at AI like another web3 situation.
0 replies
50m
The sensor feedback to stop washing is an old feature common for many years. Automatically measuring detergent could be marginally useful if it worked better than human judgement but it’s hard to implement and it’s saving only a few seconds per load, so most people are never going to see a benefit relative to how much more expensive it’d make the machines.
Worse, it’s changing a washing machine from a standalone device to an internet-connected computer which needs to regularly get software updates. That adds not just cost but increases the odds that something unrelated to the core functionality will break and make the machine unusable.
It also makes them much harder to setup and adds privacy concerns: the last Samsung washing machine I used had an amazingly clunky setup process which required a number of ToS prompts allowing them to resell your data and they insist that you need to grant their app all kinds of permissions on your phone (background location tracking, local network access, Bluetooth scanning, etc.) as part of that process. I am pretty confident that the machine will break before I would ever see a net time savings from not having to measure detergent manually relative to their setup process.
I would also be profoundly unsurprised if they get breached or abuse their data collection practices in some way which would be impossible with a regular standalone device. These features are not being added to satisfy user demand and the real customers don’t care about things like privacy or security unless it costs more than they’re making.
9 replies
15h15m
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.
5 replies
14h11m
Crapware maybe, but I don’t see a correlation between AI and bloat. If anything, AI features are correlated with less bloated software since the AI is supposed to smooth over complexity.
And some companies are using it to deliver real value. Adobe has been killing it with AI features. I switched back to Lightroom and Photoshop specifically for the new automasking, generative AI fill and such.
2 replies
13h44m
Few in the consumer mass market have ever even opened photoshop before.
The average person’s experience with “AI” is Siri telling them “I found this on the web” as a response to half of their questions. Or some streaming service suggesting a show they don’t want to watch. Or the Will Smith spaghetti meme.
People who understand LLMs are on average fairly excited about what is happening recently. But those who don’t know what LLM stands for are skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.
0 replies
10h39m
I'd say that many who know how LLMs work are both excited and annoyed at the hype machine that overstates their current and future capabilities.
0 replies
13h12m
Many people who do know what LLM stands for (and could implement the architecture themselves) are also skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.
0 replies
12h32m
And some companies are doing massive amounts of harm with AI https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate...
What passes for AI these days is a fun toy, sometimes a useful one, but it isn't anything I want to have to depend on.
0 replies
13h45m
I wouldn't deny that some companies are using it to deliver real value, but I feel like the typical case I see is barely above the level of the Logitech AI mouse. (For anyone who's not familiar, the mouse itself doesn't use AI in any way - it just has a built-in keybind to a ChatGPT integration, and of course is sold at a $10 premium to the same model with no AI button.)
2 replies
13h57m
It gives me the vibes of those NFT companies from a few years ago. All marketing, no substance.
1 replies
12h55m
I'd agree the marketing vibe is very hype-y. And just like every other hype cycle (crypto, and nft included) it feels very scummy.
But there's a lot more substance behind AI than NFTs. As much as the hype? Maybe not. More than 0 (NFTs had 0 substance)? Very much so.
I'm more hype-adverse than the next guy, but I've gotten value from AI (just plain old ChatGPT) recently as I've deep-dived into a new area. It's kinda like having a tutor in the room to whom I ask questions as they occur to me. My "tutor" isn't perfect, but neither are humans, Google, or the internet.
So I wouldn't categorize this as "no substance". There is a lot of substance here, even if it's not quite as much as the marketeers are selling.
0 replies
4h51m
That's a lot of words to say nothing.
5 replies
11h58m
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.
2 replies
11h19m
I never really bought the whole AI marketing spiels either, but I kinda understood the angle. They don't really know what they're selling, etc.
But what really shocked me, was when people on the client side are asking suppliers if they're not working on anything AI-based, since everyone is doing it. But those people did always give me the vibe you're talking about: "they don't know what to do and are desperate".
I guess my point is that maybe, at least some of the time, marketers aren't that stupid.
0 replies
9h35m
I didn't want to express that marketeers are stupid or so. In the opposite, it's an art to sell features. But having a product, like the mentioned washing machine in some thread here, and putting AI into the name is a sign of desperation for me. "We need a feature every other also might have.. let's put AI in the name and sell it twice the price"
Anyway, when you start asking what AI is doing there, you'll realize it's just a simple sensor reading and thresholding (which AI is all about)
I can't imagine a product with true AI - what is true AI? :)
0 replies
10h6m
Trying to convince your customers they’re stupid for wanting what they want is generally a pretty dumb marketing/sales tactic.
0 replies
8h16m
Yup. I've been seeing older products that I've used for awhile suddenly claim that they are "AI-powered" when I've never once used an AI feature of theirs (and often didn't even know they had one). Does not instill confidence.
0 replies
7h50m
Not only.
It it's a "real AI" (and by that i mean ChatGPT) it means that not more than a year later it will need a subscription to work.
4 replies
12h51m
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...
1 replies
12h20m
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.
That's about the same number McKinsey used for "the metaverse" a few years back.
0 replies
6h44m
But it wasn't an AI Metaverse!
0 replies
11h55m
No one is dropping the term AI.
Oh, they absolutely will. Like, they did _last_ time; in the early noughties the term ‘AI’ was poison and everything AI-adjacent got called ML. I suspect we’re already there again with consumers, though ‘AI’ may still work for investors for another year or so.
0 replies
9h58m
Everyone associated with McKinsey fails upwards and enjoys a great career:
https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biograp...
I have never heard of a sound advice originating from McKinsey that improved a company. It is hot air and promoted by the powerful who are in the right circles.
3 replies
13h45m
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.
0 replies
5h19m
Weird how calling it Apple Intelligence is the same thinking as Jack Ma calling it "Alibaba Intelligence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulqRsqD0R64
0 replies
11h59m
‘AI’ became a bit of a term non grata after the last big AI bubble popped in the late 90s, and people just called everything machine learning or similar. Google was merely more willing than Apple to try reviving it; up until recently very few companies dared use the term.
0 replies
11h58m
I like they still do not really use AI but capitalized on the hype still. But they presented actionable features with intelligence behind it unlike many companies.
With Apple Intelligence it can be whatever they want it to be. Could be ChatGPT, could be rule based. AI is now being linked to ChatGPT/conversational for many people
3 replies
6h14m
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.
1 replies
6h8m
they see 'AI' and they have no idea what that actually means.
To be fair, the providers don't know either. At the moment enough users are crazy enough to buy that as a feature. Let's see how long this will last.
0 replies
5h13m
Potentially true for earlier adopters, but we do live in a bubble with a lot more awareness for AI than most.
My dad would struggle to tell you what the acronym AI would even stand for, but he's a pretty big spender on household technology like TVs, and audio gear.
0 replies
5h43m
...and they have no idea what that actually means.
Subconsciously, many of them do "know" - it means that if you're an insecure and kinda clueless trend-chaser, then the 'AI' product is the one to buy.
2 replies
13h1m
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
1 replies
12h53m
Here’s a technological concept that deserves all the hype in the world and will never get it:
- reliability
0 replies
11h59m
I'll help you:
- relAIbility
1 replies
13h33m
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.
0 replies
5h57m
but you need to use buzzwords like these to convince executives.
And yet we’re told execs are smarter than the rest of us and deserve to make so much more than we do.
Someday I pray the executive class gets its comeuppance.
1 replies
12h56m
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.
0 replies
6h46m
This is basically Ant-Man and the Wasp, "Do you guys just put the word quantum in front of everything?".
1 replies
13h9m
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.
0 replies
11h23m
I keep getting Intel ones with Molly Caudery, the pole vaulter who didn’t get over the bar once, explaining how AI helps her analyse her performance.
It’s clearly working well for her.
1 replies
14h36m
Only some of the market is end users. The rest is businesses looking to replace headcount and they don't care what users think.
0 replies
14h32m
They are starting to care about it after catching on to out how overstated the real world capabilities of AI are to actually replace headcount.
1 replies
8h11m
Because of the fAItigue the mentioning of AI will go away, but the orweillian precrAIme is here to stay.
0 replies
8h8m
PrecrAIme ©
1 replies
10h14m
, journo terrified of AI says.
0 replies
9h58m
I often thought most journalists were terrible and could be easily automated away, and having seen the rise of LLM-produced content, I am happy to say I was wrong and that we need more journalists
1 replies
14h4m
There is very few things in world that feel as repulsive as the glowing "AI" button in our Jira.
0 replies
13h48m
My instance doesn't have this, and I'm kinda glad that it has not been enabled.
1 replies
10h55m
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.
0 replies
1h19m
Please add gamification to the list, and big data.
1 replies
14h2m
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.
0 replies
13h59m
The fun bit is that the other 10% are just bog standard ML/DL models with the added benefit of being called "AI".
0 replies
6h25m
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!
0 replies
11h59m
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
0 replies
5h49m
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.
0 replies
10h6m
A study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management
Haha. So they made a splash talking about AI. Well played.
0 replies
7h21m
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.
0 replies
13h59m
Nice try, competitors
0 replies
13h19m
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.
0 replies
2h32m
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.
0 replies
8h54m
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.
0 replies
6h7m
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.
0 replies
12h45m
They should avoid actually deploying the massively invasive and power hungry anti-feature as well
0 replies
11h4m
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.
0 replies
12h24m
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...
0 replies
12h12m
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.
0 replies
13h31m
Kinda hilarious seeing how hard people went to add "AI" to pretty much everything.
0 replies
5h58m
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.
0 replies
9h0m
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.
0 replies
5h53m
Who would have thought. Don't believe the hype, especially if you have skin in the game.
0 replies
14h57m
Wish it would start turning off investors so we can see other kinds of innovation.
0 replies
8h9m
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.
0 replies
7h38m
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.
0 replies
12h25m
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...
0 replies
13h23m
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.
0 replies
5h52m
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.
0 replies
10h26m
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.
0 replies
11h53m
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.
0 replies
15h3m
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.
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11h32m
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.
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5h33m
AI = blockchain 2.0
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7h8m
Same happen to crypto.
I'm an huge crypto enthusiast, but whenever I see the term "crypto" being used somewhere I just cringe.
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11h26m
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”.
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5h31m
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.
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13h10m
[dupe]
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685
I don’t watch a lot of broadcast TV but had some live TV up during the Olympics.
Every ad break included ads for Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Salesforce Einstein.
We are in a full on AI product marketing cycle.
I just returned from vacation in Wisconsin, where the Olympics were on everywhere. Every single time an ad prompting AI came on, people loudly booed, and it was not uncommon to hear "don't be a sucker!" and "fuck that bullshit" yelled out. When I asked, people would say "I'm not stupid, I'm not touching AI anything."
I grew up and live in small town Wisconsin. Sounds very believable.
I say this with the utmost respect and concern for my friends, family, and neighbors:
This attitude is part of the reason why the rust belt exists - filled with towns and cities that are a shell of their former selves. Areas of constant economic hardship, endemic drug use, etc.
The two big factories in the town I went to high school in are closed. Needless to say things aren’t going well… Yelling at the TV didn’t do anything to prevent that and it’s not going to do anything to prevent the next wave of it.
It’s harsh, but an important lesson since the beginning of time:
Adapt or die.
This could be a really funny comment in 5 years if the plagiarism generators actually worked.
You could be out of a job with as little control of the whole situation as those rustbeltians you have such disregard for.
NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt. The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.
When you ship off a persons job in mass this is what happens.
I'll admit I was a bit angry and offended when I first read this. Did you miss the part about how horribly this has affected my friends, family, and neighbors? I say this expressly out of concern and literal, actual love.
Where do you live?
As I said in my other reply the generation before this one also outright dismissed the ability for Mexico, China, etc to take their jobs. In any case it certainly wasn't prevented.
Again, as I said in my other reply what little manufacturing is left is a fraction of the jobs with a completely different skill set - CNC programming, etc. While you're off on Java because (frankly) you don't know what you're talking about it's pretty much exactly this.
I live in the Midwest. I don’t know what all your other reply’s to other people say.
I’m not sure what your point is substituting one language for another - you can’t take a guy who’s painted cars his whole life and retool him to “cnc programming” even if the lathes didn’t git moved with the rest of production. The c suite did hit their stock goals tho so at least that is good!
If you’re telling a blue collar worker who’s been laid off “adapt or die” then you have contempt for those very love ones you claim to sympathize with.
I think OP referenced Java because it was the hot language of the 90s/early 2000s that people would harp on about studying.
Sort of like how people nowadays go to bootcamps to study JavaScript and Python
I disagree. It's good that people scrutinize and resist corporate greed. Accepting that "AI" (whatever that means) should be in every single product I use is not adapting. It's bending over. People have the power to vote with their wallets (and their actual votes), and they should do so.
Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists. Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
I agree. Problem is it didn't do anything when they were saying the exact same things that led to the closure or significant job loss of the manufacturing that was the core of these communities:
1) "Hah, my factory job is complicated. The Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, etc will never figure it out." Racist/xenophobic but said at the time. Even more wrong.
2) Look at robotics. It also took some time for the technology to develop and many of these same people looked at early implementations and thought the exact same thing: "Oh those robots don't really work and they never will". Then their factory jobs became a fraction of the head count with a completely different skill set...
Throughout history this has played out over and over again.
Key word being /should/. Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets. The same people who laughed at and dismissed the Chinese are going to Wal-Mart everyday and buying goods from (you guessed it) - China. They're also voting for the same corporate-funded politicians.
For many of these people their best option now is working at the large Amazon warehouse down the road where they pick and pack goods largely from (you guessed it again) - China. But even then there just aren't that many of those jobs and as the horror stories reported in the media show they're routinely abused there.
Next time you're in the US visiting New York, California, Florida, etc come visit the rust belt in "flyover country" and see just how devastating the effects of this are. I see and live it (to some extent) everyday.
A huge factor and the ultimate root of the problem but back to voting, wallets, etc: in the real world this isn't going anywhere and from what I see it's just getting worse.
My concern comes from seeing the blight and literal deaths in MY community. My concern now is AI is coming for the white collar workforce as well.
Another old adage:
"Don't underestimate your enemy/competition".
I agree with most of your points. However, I stand by my point that corporations looking to cut costs moved those production jobs abroad. This will happen time and again under capitalism. I think blaming the working poor is not the right conclusion to draw.
The only way to prevent this is to reign in capitalism. Neoliberalism does not work.
Unfortunately, yes. People are strongly influenced by propaganda. Propaganda is often bankrolled by corporations. A good start with be curb lobbyism and make it more transparent.
Or they have developed a good filter for BS marketing. The markets can adapt also.
Maybe. Or (maybe) yelling at the TV is a lot easier (and more visceral) than thinking "Hmm, this whole AI thing just might work out. Maybe I should treat the threat seriously this time just like my dad should have with the Chinese, robots, etc". As I said in my other reply it's generally not a good idea to outright dismiss what is even in the early stages a pretty clear potential threat to your livelihood.
This can mean nearly anything and I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate in this context.
Your position is ahistorical.
The Rust Belt exists (primarily) because the companies who owned all the big manufacturing in the late 20th century outsourced all of that labor to Asia.
If people who live there have a higher-than-average distrust of big corporate bullshit, it's an effect of being abandoned by them, not the cause of it.
This isn't much different to some of the early reactions to computers...
It is still not marketed to you the same way the millions of ads you see of prescription drugs that can only be prescribed by doctors are marketed on tv.
Of course the drug ads are marketed to you, so you go and get a prescription from your doctor.
Likewise, everybody and their dog has ChatGPT installed and think of AI as this magical thing that's gonna change the world, so they are potential indirect customers.
Does everybody really have ChatGPT installed? I, and most of my colleagues at work in the development department, don't use ChatGPT for anything. A couple of us use Copilot-esque tools, but even then, the suggestions are almost always useless.
I don't use any form of "AI", and I'm a software engineer. At least two of my friends, who don't work in software, have somehow learned about ChatGPT and routinely use it for whatever.
I have used ChatGPT a few times instead of looking up documentation. It can give you a better start point for common stuff, like draw a scatter plot with upper and lower limits with matplotlib.
I then tweak the example to suit my needs exactly.
But it takes away only a small amount of busy work. It's not as helpful as AI proponents make you believe.
"Of course the drug ads are marketed to you, so you go and get a prescription from your doctor."
The main purpose of Big Pharma's saturation advertising spend on TV networks is the buying of influence with those networks - not marketing, secondary or otherwise.
Pardon?
It’s a fraction of a percent of the population that have used it.
A rather improper fraction, though. Pick some random non-techie person and they'll have at least tried it.
After spending time abroad you begin to realize just how insane these commercials are. Only the US and like Australia allow these weird doctor-bypass medical advice/brainwashing sessions.
That’s uniquely American.
In the UK, Google and AWS have been advertising AI-based tools or AI-supporting services on TV recently.
Most major investors are American - in this space anyway - or mediated through American investment companies. So….
True, but there's a lot of room for ulterior motives there too.
I mean, some of it may be about getting end-users to pay for AI-thingies, but running the ads can also be seen as investor-posturing even if if it doesn't say "buy our stock", and there may be a corporate goal of boosting the (free) usage-numbers in order to present that to investors, etc.
We saw the same thing with crypto ads dominating the Super Bowl a couple of years ago and gambling apps during the NBA playoffs. TV advertising for major sporting events is a "flex" as so few companies can afford the cost of a national ad slot. The ones that do usually have money to burn from investors.
To be fair, the line between crypto speculator and crypto customer is very thin indeed. :P
Huh? Samsung has adverts all over the place about how their phones have AI. They don’t even talk about what it does. Just that they have AI.
Even their washing machines have AI!
-- https://soyacincau.com/2024/05/15/samsung-bespoke-ai-laundry...
If you can't defeat the people talking about the AI bubble, join them?
"AI Bubble which mixes water, air and detergent..."
It's so Samsung. Back when Internet of Things was a thing, I went to an IoT meeting in SF where one of the speakers was from Samsung. They had a refrigerator with a tablet built into the door. The tablet and refrigerator shared nothing but power, and cost more than a comparable refrigerator and tablet separately. I asked the speaker why they built this, and was told that there's a fraction of the market that likes to show off their kitchens who will buy this stuff.
It's still very much a product that you can buy. One of the "features" was being able to look into the fridge with an inward facing camera from your phone while you're away from home. Potentially useful if you really can't remember what you have while at the grocery store.
One problem... it only showed 3 shelves on the fridge side. You couldn't PTZ the camera around the entire fridge. No way to see the stuff stored in the door. No way to check the freezer, etc. Most reviewers concluded it was practically useless.
But this is a great example of something no one has ever asked for. Even the suckers buying it never wanted it, they would just buy “top of the line” no matter what useless “features” that means.
See also the similar situation with everything from smart tvs to toasters. I try to enjoy experiences with flashlights and paper maps while these things are still available. If toothpaste were invented today it would be engineered with a short shelf life and require a subscriptionI can imagine a fridge with an (outside) camera that can take a picture of your groceries (make the user hold it for a fraction of a second in front of the camera) and categorize it as well as see its expiration date (or estimate, e.g. for fruits and vegetables) would actually be useful, considering we throw away so much food.
And if it can't identify the item, it can even ask the user to identify the item ("pasta I made last night") and how long they think it will last.
If it's made by a committee of idiots, it will just repeatedly say "Cannot identify item. Please name this item."... if it's actually good it will just have different beep tones for different states (Beep A: "All good", beep B: "Can't identify item", beep C: "Can't see expiration date", etc)
Can't wait for my washing machine to be able to make an API call to OpenAI so it can worked out how best to tackle the stain on my undies. We really are living in the future.
No internet / dns fail / openai failed patching and bam! Whole world wears dirty clothes.
I hope EU will make this illegal if it isnt yet, they seem to be the only real power these days not giving a fuck about revenues of corporations in the first place when deciding stuff.
"This stain again, week after week? Ordering fibrous cereal from Amazon...".
I've seen this and it's very silly. Every step where the machine makes an automated decision, it displays a message like, "using AI to xyz." I have to imagine the "AI" to determine how long the cycle should be is a linear function of some metric like weight.
But I suppose you could view that as a neural network with a single neuron.
Moreover, any hardcoded behavior can be seen as a neural net with no neurons!
Maybe the real AI was the friends we made along the way.
Fix photos?
Big investors get a boner when they think about AI. So founders get FOMO and shove it into everything.
Not that much different from the recent crypto bubble TBH
started with crypto -> blockchain -> NFT -> AI
what’s the next big bubble?
You missed metaverses. Also there was another AI one; there was a smallish computer vision oriented bubble early last decade. Main product was a lot of money wasted on putative self-driving cars, but there was other stuff.
Also wearables, VR/AR (possibly included in your computer-vision category), 3DTV, nanotech, tablet computers (possibly breaking out), brain-computer interfaces, IoT (AI is the new IoT, IMO), 3D printing, Big Data, Theranos (and other highly-customised healthcare, think 23andMe).
Oh, huh. Totally forgot about IoT, yeah. I think tablet computers are a _bit_ different; they were never really sold as changing the world, and have carved out a definite niche (certainly more so than any of that other stuff).
I don't think metaverses really interested anyone appart from Facebook in recent years. Who invested in those really?
I think everybody remember that all but a few addicts got quickly bored of second life in the mid 00's and it was not worth trying a second time.
BI aka Business Intelligence of course /s
Can I ask for one that does not involve GPUs?
If it comes back to the "bubble" price and surpasses it less than 3 years later, was it really a bubble?
It's like self-driving cars and Uber. The investor wet dream is to fire all your expensive salaried employees and replace them with an AI slave.
... shove it into the pitch deck and nowhere else
This makes sense if you ignore every single example of AI-based features popping up all over consumer-facing services
It's literally true that it is being marketed to consumers. GP was being somewhat poetic. Marketing to consumers is an instrumental goal in service of marketing to investors. The aim is to sell more stock to investors rather than more product to consumers.
That being said, GP has made the implicit assumption that they can't market it to investors as AI and to consumers as something else, and if investor interest in AI doesn't ebb, then I expect they will find a way to do just that.
AI is impossible to pitch to customers because its performance is not measurable. Could be good one day (remember Siri in 2017?) and crap the next.
How would you pitch a feature with erratic behavior?
As "creative", "diverse", and "enriching". ;)
Also ‘exciting’ and ‘an adventure to use’.
Hang on - 87% of end-customer marketing is already aspirational, potential quality (of life) - over measurable, quantifiable - outcomes.
To your second question, I believe a popular adjective might be 'invigorating'.
They are popping up all over consumer-facing services because investors want them, not because consumers want them.
AI being literally marketed to consumers in order to court investors is not the same thing as “AI is not being marketed to consumers” though
OP was trying to be clever (i.e. the key audience for this marketing is actually investors), most everyone else understood their meaning I believe.
Believe me, I'm trying.
Yep I have Edge here on my phone and I quote
"the AI browser".
So yes I do see it in marketing.
Yesterday I went to buy an electric toothbrush and some were marketed as having "AI". This thing is reaching astronomical bandwagon proportions.
Well at least you can switch your crypto mining toothbrush with AI infused one that will analyze movements of your hands and once sold to insurance brokers conclude you have an old injury and are a risky driver raising your insurance premiums.
I was thinking "AI" is the new "blockchain".
Yesterday I went to a college entry prep seminar for my kid and they were selling a "personalized preparation plan created by algorithms and AI"
Exactly. Marketing dollars come from investors. A big part of modern marketing for startups is spending tons of investor money to "grow" quickly. How long the fire burns doesn't matter, it's all about throwing dried out February Christmas trees onto the flames for quick bursts of flame.
every time I see the AI box in Clickup I cringe. it is being marketed to users we just all avoid it, as the story says.
You’d be shocked at how brain dead the csuite who influence buying decisions can be.
Oh walstreet cares about ai. What’s our ai plan. Internal team, we are buying a new AI dev product that’ll reduce headcount needs by 10%. Csuite sounds great!
Exactly, I had an interview at some company last year that had AI in their name and got a million invested in them. I read their website and saw nothing that really showcased AI it seemed like just something you could code with basic filtering. The interview felt like I was consulting them on what to do next and I probably should of been paid.
Arent the Investors the main consumers for software goods by now? The customer consumer (cc) is just a stage to mass adoption on the way towards en-shitification, basically some late stage fracking process chemical, needed yes, but not a decisionmaker when it comes to drilling.
It’s a catch-22
You need to put AI to raise money or appeal to a broad swath of consumers, but educated consumers and enterprise buyers are increasingly rolling their eyes at it.