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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? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 3 months ago by Acamon to c/asklemmy

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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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[–] EnderMB 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's a symptom of shareholder-driven development.

Many companies pushing AI have had huge layoffs, and haven't launched anything worthwhile in years. Many of these companies have a metric fuck-ton of data, and already do some kind of AI (they probably have had LLM's for years too). This way, they can spend money and make it look like they're doing groundbreaking stuff to ensure shareholders are happy.

They'll continue to do stealth layoffs of people outside of AI, until the hype dies down, and they'll move to the next grift - after laying off all of their AI folks.

[–] Hexbatch 4 points 3 months ago

I think AI helps the smart consumer avoid companies and products that are on the rocks, or bad .

Obviously the monopolies are not in trouble, but it’s very helpful to see smaller companies waving the AI banner like a going out of business flag, or an enshittification decal.

In my particular line of work I use developer tools, and the above has been so helpful in showing me trends of actually useful products