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

This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more.

Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.

We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face.

Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively making a worse UI and often providing little to no benefit.

Most consumers don’t actually care how their tech works, just that it does and gives them benefits.

I really don’t look forward to this new world, AI is a powerful and useful too for creators but it will and already is used for all the wrong reasons, apparently even to pick which targets to destroy in war, essentially making life or death decisions in some areas with little to no oversight. And then people here think that any kind of regulation around this tech is useless and unwarranted…

Don’t get me wrong I use AI all the time but I fear it will be the most disruptive technological development in both positive and negative ways that we have ever dealt with.

- Steve Jobs

from https://youtu.be/XbkMcvnNq3g?si=8Y56TFmKHJhlFXoE&t=364

--Steve Jobs

QuickBooks has annoying suggestions that shift the whole UI and cannot be disabled. Misclicks now happen.

The AI in my robot vacuum is... just a label? I don't want to talk to it. I want it to deterministically clean my stuff.

My TV got an upgrade to Gemini. Why? I don't talk to the TV, and it's in my face. (I'm think about getting a device that can do Plex->Atmos streaming).

So yeah, as a signal the AI brand is about as bad as it gets. Crypto tier. But just like crypto, the investors want to see that signal regardless of any underlying substance.

  > Everything is sorted out! 
  > Everything is now sorted out, and I hope this solution works well for you.

Selling an “AI” product is like describing a C++ compiler as a feature to someone buying a video game

This is what happens when you run dark strategies. They might work for a little bit in small doses, but eventually they bite you in the ass.

For example:

I wanted to make a pie chart in Excel of 5 cells, so I selected them and told Copilot to make a pie chart. It put a pie chart image in the chat window, and told me where to click to make the pie chart, but didn't actually make the pie chart for me.

Sometimes my phone's camera saves a picture in the wrong orientation, and I don't feel like digging around for where Google put the rotate button today. There's an easily-accessible prompt box, but it can't follow "rotate the image 90 degrees to the left".

---

The thing is, unless you use an app to do a task all the time, often it takes longer to find the button, remember the keystroke, or look it up on Google than it takes to just bang out a prompt. And, if I can tell my IDE to "write a unit test for this class" and get back something useful, why can't I tell Excel to "make a pie chart for these cells" and get back something useful?

Our customer base about 70% can’t stand AI, 20% doesn’t care, and 10% thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world.

For example, apart from my day job, I do IT consulting for small local businesses. I do anything from landing pages to AI integration into their existing processes to make them more efficient at their work. The end result is their customers getting faster and better quality service, and my customers get to focus more on their business instead of administration. They don't really care that it's AI, but they do care about the results.

And I think that's the part many executives are missing. Focus on building great products. If AI is part of it, cool. But unless you're OpenAI or Anthropic, AI is probably not your product.

You can already see what's coming, too. At some point in the near future, companies will make a point of offering products without AI (to whatever extent) and start offering the bespoke, organic or Classic (i.e. Mexican Coke) versions and charging even more for them.

How is training my replacement on a plagiarism machine that is actively putting people (including myself) out of the job while destroying the environment (but whose results are still not as good as a human) in any world a good thing?

There is no boost in productivity for non-tech related stuff. If you need to double-check the output, it is de facto not as productive as a human, since you need to effectively do the work twice.

Also, it adds nothing of value where is is being crammed into everything, and just seems to be a cynical techbro PE driven buzzword play.

Part of this is incentivized by investors that want everything they invest in to be an AI thingy so they can feel good about themselves. So, you have a lot of startups optimizing for that. This is not a new thing of course. Every if-else type logic got shamelessly labeled AI at some point even fifteen years ago. I've been in a few places where that happened.

Other than that, I can't see why consumers should care for most things they actually buy and pay for.

But of course they tend to fall in the feature matrix trap where when faced with choice between product A and product B, they tend to go for the one with the most elaborate spec sheet. Even if most of that is just meaningless word soup to them. True for phones, TVs, stereo equipment, cars, etc. Most people really have no clue what they are buying so they just over pay under the assumption that it will cover their needs. AI goes in a long list of meaningless marketing language that companies use to market their products. Most people say they are not sensitive to that, but their purchase choices usually tell a different story. Marketing people know that.

if that is what that means, i would actually say keep improving... since ai is new and there's a lot of mixed feelings about it, it's understandable that sentiment leaks into ai-enabled products.

that being said, there are /a lot/ of ai chatbot product integrations that are actual dogwater and we should not do them. like the stupid amazon integration that is forced upon me that took up like 30% of my screen and straight up just was worthless.

i think the best ai consumer facing workflows you dont actually directly interface with ai via what is expected to be a human interface like chat - it should do processing in the backend, or it supports a human agent.

    > Al Ries asserted that a brand is a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of a prospect.  
    > 
    > Source: https://heidicohen.com/what-is-branding [2011-08-15]

    The keyword - mind. That is, a human being is supposed to stand behind a "brand", who is responsible for it, and is to be trusted for the product, the effort, the experience they offer.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/coca-cola-uses-ai-to-create-a-fut...

It's pushing an internal tech detail onto customer faces that only care about a problem being solved.

It's virtue signaling for investors and a usually misguided attempt to look trendy or cool.

To my amazement I picked up a, grifty “hair regrowth” supplement. Right on the top of the box, they had the text: “AI TECHNOLOGY”

If you want to know what the fuck is happening to this country you just have to understand that we’re at a point where a company finds it even worth slapping an obvious grift on an obvious grift because there’s enough low IQ idiots to buy.

The mood has shifted dramatically, but that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone that never leaves tech circles where it’s still all AI all the time.

Feels like the old iThing or eWare trends of the 00s. New thing, new marketing trend.

- AI loves to use "consumers" instead of just saying people or Americans

- "You’ve spent time and budget on it, yet your audience can’t name a single company they think is doing it well. "

- "The small moments that used to make the web worth visiting are disappearing."

- "The brand that builds that recognition first gets to define the standard."

Nearly every sentence has an AI-ism...

A) Crap marketing departments slapping AI on everythign

B) Actual organic hate for AI a la booing at graduation ceremony

People have a huge capacity to absorb enshittification of everything they consume, from goods /services to culture to politics, if they receive some kind of short term gratification.

But in the back of people's minds, when people hear "AI", is the underlying question: "is it going to take my livelihood?"

IMO that's what motivates the negativity, not some miscalibrated branding.

When you have AI startups running ads like "Why hire humans, our bots work 24/7 and don't WFH or report things to HR" (almost verbatim) .. what does one expect?

if there's anything worse than LLM-written text, it's websites that rally against LLMs and AI-use, then blatantly just use AI to do the thing they're against

if you're going to be anti-ai, at least don't use it!!

Yet a third or so of HN submissions are about AI BS. Just another confirmation techdorks are out of this world.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2025/nov/07...

AI, among non-tech people means two things: slop and shitty customer service bots.

E.g. Spotify is using AI extensively, consequently I expect them to reduce the price very soon. Maybe like a 50% cut.

This isn't unique to tech, either. In recent years, I've started to notice all the advertising around me increasingly targeting businesses and investors rather than the average person. Feels like we're quickly moving towards a post-consumer society, in which trying to convince the average middle class consumer to buy your product is no longer relevant, because that's simply not where the money is anymore.

To put it simply, the last few decades have been about glorifying the average Simpson. KISS and Marvel movies. Trump-level speech. And now along comes something that is going to take the pain of deep complicated thinking away (what a relief!), but the damn villain not only walks the talk[^1], it also unfortunately talks the talk with complicated words, correct capitalization and (gasp!) em--dashes. What's not to hate about it?

[^1]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192777/walk-the-...

Skynet slop is still finding confused humans here. Will they end up loving and embracing their new AI masters?

A good story here is notion: I don’t think they (only) stuck AI features. They made it possible for me to use it from AI. This is meaningfully different because it enables * composability *.

I record my notes in Notion using Apple Watch and summarise them or use them through Claude account which has a plugin to Notion.

Now think about it: employees in notion wont think of this as an amazing feature because it is utterly simple to implement. There’s no limelight or anything. If they had made some fancy AI integration within notion to autocomplete or whatever, the optics are better internally. But outside it is lukewarm to bad.

I wish more companies enable composability instead of bespoke AI integration within their application.

The toaster brand is just trying to fool people. Something like Mythos is actually what's driving change.

In tech, Microsoft is a big reason for this turnoff. First, they forced Copilot onto Windows users. Second, they decided to market "AI PCs" by forcing AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to put NPUs into their SoCs. But a tiny NPU is no match for frontier LLMs. Therefore, customers are sold on their PCs having something as good as ChatGPT built in but in reality, it's barely powerful enough to fix your grammar.

Everyone around me, including my elderly parents, love using ChatGPT. Go to any coffee shop and you'll see ChatGPT on nearly everyone's laptop. People aren't turned off by OpenAI or Anthropic. They're turned off by everyone else.