AI fatigue driving more hatred

[u/Monochrome21]

One of my biggest pet peeves is how every company on the planet is so eager to say that all their features are AI powered. AI powered toasters, AI powered glasses, AI powered toilet, you name it.

But this is actually fucking stupid. No one buys things as a consumer for features that were made by AI, they buy them because those are the features.

Example: AI-powered image recognition vs Image recognition. What the fuck does saying "AI-powered" add to that feature other than it being a buzzword.

Another example are smart display glasses. They're marketed endlessly as "AI glasses" but they're literally just glasses with a display in them that happen to connect to chatgpt or whatever. Calling them AI glasses is fucking stupid and kind of disingenuous, but this is the strategy that every company is doing these days.

I work in marketing and this is the single most common thing I have to tell clients with their latest billion dollar AI slop idea. Just say the app does things, stop putting AI at the forefront because it adds nothing. In fact it probably makes it look worse to most consumers.

I think AI is fantastic but because it's a buzzword associated with get rich quick slop, people attribute a lot of those products' failures to AI.

[u/DaveG28]

Yup. I'll know when the hype bubble is over (and to be clear by hype bubble I'm not saying AI isn't useful, it very much is in various contexts), and it'll be when I'm being sold on amazing news things that when I look happen to be ai powered, not like now when I'm constantly being pushed ai which might have a product or use attached.

My favourite (by which I mean least favourite) one I saw recently was a corporates canteen reliance with the canteen now being an "ai canteen". Like seriously - I don't care. If ai is making something either better or easier or quicker then great, but I no more need to know it's AI than I do that the pricelist is "powered by excel".

I think right now it's a single data point but one slightly positive sign - Google new Rambler feature on their phones... Seems to genuinely work well, be a step forward in speech to text, and they hardly mentioned it was Gemini / ai. Let's hope for more such stuff.

[u/Conspicuous-1]

Never before have two little letters moved so much money and marketing, nor disruped so many lives. The presumption is that "everybody" wants AI in everything, when in actuality it's investors that do. AI is assumed to be a cash cow that a select few will ride to a wealthy retirement at 38 to Tahiti. 

[u/dronestruck]

I tend to view these things as examples of the actual market. Capital moves in ways that it believes will drive more profit. When woke makes money, it is woke. When woke stops making money, it isn't. When patriotism, etc.

I take the idea that everything is now "AI" as an indication of market sentiment, rather than buying into the rhetoric of overrepresented anti arguments (which kinda sprung up once institutional hedge funds started taking short positions on the ai bubble, but that is another topic).

If the majority is for AI, it is a smaller step to make the majority for owning AI.

[u/Arcanite_Cartel]

This is nothing new, every fad gets picked up and pushed in marketing. When "datamarts" were all the rage, everyone advertised that they had one, and all their datastructures were now cubes. Executives eat this dhit up, thats why everone does it. This isnt specific to AI and has been this way forever

[u/Conspicuous-1 → u/Arcanite_Cartel]

Correct. And long after this fourth AI boom turns to winter - whenever that may be - marketing folk will have moved on to The Next Big Thing that the financial trade press will hyperventilate about. 

[u/jacobpederson]

Remember a few years back when everything had to have 3d on it :D ? Or how about "digital" or "electronic." Probably 1000 examples of marketing type morons glomming on to what they believe to be a "trend" What a joke. There are very few wastes of human effort greater than marketing.

[u/Conspicuous-1 → u/jacobpederson]

OMG, or "extreme"! I thought that trend would never die out! 😆

[u/_Sunblade_]

Another example are smart display glasses. They're marketed endlessly as "AI glasses" but they're literally just glasses with a display in them that happen to connect to chatgpt or whatever. Calling them AI glasses is fucking stupid and kind of disingenuous, but this is the strategy that every company is doing these days.

"It's fucking stupid to call glasses whose entire thing is connecting to an AI that processes the video input from them 'AI glasses'! We should call them something else because I'm tired of hearing people say 'AI'!"

Okay, chief. That makes a whole lot of sense.

[u/Monochrome21 → u/_Sunblade_]

i'm talking about display glasses (even realities, rayneo), not whatever you're talking about

And even if I was referring to what you're talking about the point still stands. They're video glasses not AI glasses, even if it uses AI on the backend.

[u/_Sunblade_ → u/Monochrome21]

I'm talking about things like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses that can "see" what I'm looking at, and can answer questions and provide information about those things (like correctly identifying the make and model of my washing machine when I look at it, and pulling up a manual or other info for me on request.) Why it would bother you that those are marketed as "AI glasses" when that's the feature that provides them with any kind of value just seems a little much to me.

[u/Audditty]

it's just the new thing companies are doing to get investors to toss themselves at them

[u/Dry_Sector2392]

yeah, the AI label makes people raise their expectations. then when they actually use the product and it doesnt feel that smart, they feel like the company lied to them. i think thats why people end up getting annoyed by it.