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If "AI" doesn't attract customers why are companies hyping it so hard? Are they just dumb or is there another factor? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by Acamon@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I've seen reports and studies that show products advertised as including / involving AI are off-putting to consumers. And this matches what almost every person I hear irl or online says. Regardless of whether they think that in the long-term AI will be useful, problematic or apocalyptic, nobody is impressed Spotify offering a "AI DJ" or "AI coffee machines".

I understand that AI tech companies might want to promote their own AI products if they think there's a market for them. And they might even try to create a market by hyping the possibilities of "AI". But rebranding your existing service or algorithms as being AI seems like super dumb move, obviously stupid for tech literate people and off-putting / scary for others. Have they just completely misjudged the world's enthusiasm for this buzzword? Or is there some other reason?

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[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 13 points 3 months ago

I personally think people were "burned" by the whole NFT situation. During the NFT "hype" a year or two ago, a lot of companies were slow to get on board with releasing NFT products, and so they missed the bubble entirely. NFTs are, of course, silly but if they did take off, companies would have loved to have been part of the boon.

Fast forward to now and you have AI bros shilling AI in the same way cryptobros were shilling NFTs. However, this time it's different! They have results, they have technology. Microsoft is on board! They have fancy tech demos which are not staged at all! If you didn't have experience with the technology and limitations, you would be lead to believe that this is the same as the NFT bubble, but it's actually going to be a real technology rather than snake oil.

I think there's also the issue that it takes a long time to bring a product to market. Imagine you've spent millions developing software and hardware for your AI coffee machine or whatever and it turns out that there's no market demand. You can't really turn to your stakeholders and say "oops, we made a mistake and have to cancel this product. Sorry!", you have to finish the product and try to recoup losses where you can. That's why there's all these weird posts advertising AI products - they can't just not release a product, and AI bros might be tempted to buy it.

I also wonder if the whole AI hate is bias due to us being here on mastodonlemmy... We tend towards fairly cynical people who are critical towards new technology and corporations. Maybe actual consumers who aren't online all day and clued into the tech scene are wowwed by AI. I've certainly seen people here casually remark that they use ChatGPT and Copilot.

[-] Lemminary@lemmy.world 15 points 3 months ago

I also wonder if the whole AI hate is bias due to us being here on mastodonlemmy…

Yeah, we're cynical but we have every right to be.

I use ChatGPT, Copilot, and image generators for different things and I'm generally not on board with the blind hate because it's been nice to have an assistant that can do all these manial things. But honestly, I've gotten mixed results and don't see this tech correcting its obvious problems. The latest ChatGPT-4o release was great with its web browser, images, and speech, but it still struggles with accuracy to a tangible degree. Or worse, other companies use it for the wrong things as a cash grab to change perfectly working products. Even the applications that do seem perfect for it are not.

For example, I can't get Gemini to answer anything but simple questions about Google Docs without it getting confused and repeating the same thing. Copilot will sometimes reach conclusions wildly different from the sources it cites. ChatGPT will give you suboptimal code samples, be subtly wrong about the meaning of words in other languages, or suddenly forget part of my instructions. And now people are adding it to the fucking coffee machine for crying out loud. I'd have a different opinion if it were more accurate most of the time and genuinely useful, but using it more often only cements it in my mind as a secondary productivity tool rather than the main feature.

I hope the hype dies down and AI is seen as an afterthought enhancement rather than a stupid selling point. Anybody selling AI now looks clueless to me.

[-] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You can't really turn to your stakeholders and say "oops, we made a mistake and have to cancel this product. Sorry!", you have to finish the product and try to recoup losses where you can.

You can and should. You're describing sunk cost fallacy, which is pretty close to universally understood as a terrible money vacuum of a flaw in our reasoning. (I would have made this comment if I hadn't read Quit literally yesterday, but it really is an excellent book about the value of abandoning bad decisions when new information makes it clear that they're bad decisions.) Buying time and raising expectations with a dead end nonsense tech might be better 6 months from now, but 5 years from now, being the guy that saw the writing on the wall that the continued investment was lighting money on fire will leave you better off.

LLMs have limited applications, and will in the future, but nowhere near enough to warrant the obscene amount of resource burn companies are spending to get there.

I also wonder if the whole AI hate is bias due to us being here on mastodonlemmy... We tend towards fairly cynical people who are critical towards new technology and corporations

Corporations, sure, but tech? Anti-tech people aren't early adopters of new tech products. Early adopters are just generally more aware of the actual shape of the field than people jumping on hype trains once they've already started moving.

[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 1 points 3 months ago

So firstly, if you were the person running a several million dollar project which then gets cancelled, you are absolutely getting fired. If you were acting entirely in your own self interest, it would be better to make the project last as long as you can. Maybe it ends up succeding by a fluke and you keep your job?

Secondly, you're assuming that all that money just vanishes when the product is released. The product is still out there in the market, and there are still some people will buy it. If you're 80% of the way through the project, it might be worth spending the remaining 20% in order to recoup at least some of your costs.

[-] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

People cancel projects and keep their jobs or get new ones all the time. Having the awareness that a project is junk is better for your employment long term than running through way more money and still failing miserably. The people with money notice, and other high level executives notice. Moonshots fail. Pull the damn plug when it's not viable.

You're not 80% of the way there. You haven't made a dent. Because the tech doesn't work and isn't capable of working. Every additional dollar you spend has a massively negative expected return. Chasing "make up your losses" on a project that's dead in the water is virtually never a valid strategy.

[-] lemmyng@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 months ago

You're essentially describing FOMO. The hype bros are telling the CEOs "if you don't offer AI then your competition will, and they'll take all your customers."

this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024

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