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?
Hype brings investment money to the table. When an emerging technology appears, you can say we are looking to develop those technologies into our existing products and you will see a bump up in your share price.
After a few years of failed products and the hype dies for the next thing you can never mention the old hype but keep the bump in share price.
Think about 5-7 years ago, Blockchain was all the hype, 5-7 before then was Machine Learning and XaaS, before that was Big Data.
The dumbest part about all of this is that the “AI” that’s currently building up all the hype is just machine learning
Yeah, investors kind of amplify hype. When there is hype, you will have some investors investing money.
If there’s investors investing money, it makes sense for other investors to try to invest first, so that their invested money gains value (the share price rises).
And then it becomes somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because suddenly you do have companies equipped with money to pursue that hype, which can feed back into the hype.But similarly, you’ll eventually reach a point where it does not live up to the inflated hype and then shareholders can just as well be extremely quick to pull out their money and amplify the crash.
Investors also know not every product will sell. So pad the bet and spread wide to increase your chances to score big.
AI has some useful applications, just most of them are a bit niche and/or have ethical issues so while it’s worth having the tools and functionality to do things, no one can do much with them.
Like for example we pretty much have AIs that could generate really good audio books using your favourite actors voi e likeness, but it’s a legal nightmare, and audio books are a niche already.
In game development being able to use AI for texture generation, rigging, animations are pretty good and can save lots of time, but it comes at the cost of jobs.
Some useful applications for end users are things like noise removal and dynamic audio enhancement AIs which can make your mic not sound like you are talking from a tunnel under a motorway when in meetings, or being able to do basic voice activation of certain tools, even spam filtering.
The whole using AI to sidestep being creative or trying to pretend to collate knowledge in any meaningful way is a bit out of grasp at the moment. Don’t get me wrong it has a good go at it, but it’s not actually intelligent it’s just throwing out lots of nonsense hoping for the best.
It attracts investors in the company not customers.
Think like a venture investor.
A small chance of huge growth via new technology can have a big payoff. They expect most companies to fail and are more worried about missing an opportunity than losing money in a single bad investment.
Nobody is quite sure where AI technology will be in ten years, but if it’s big, it’s going to make people who got in early very rich. It doesn’t matter that it sucks now; the web sucked in 1995, but it made people who got in (and out) at the right time very rich.
It was super cool for like three weeks. Now it’s the gambler’s fallacy they’re hanging on to.
Ohhh, you fn nailed it. Nice comparison.
We had IoT, Web3, and now AI. Part of it seems linked to very good salespeople pushing it onto other salespeople.
For the first two, we’ve seen business spinup quickly and have very aggressive arguments, backed by cash, pushed onto existing business as “the solution to everything”. Only to burn down later as a gimmick nobody really cares beyond a handful of niche applications.
So far with AI there’s a handful of “big name” business that pushes it as the ultimate solution for everything and are injecting ton of cash in that discourse. We just have to wait a bit if the last part of that happens. After that we’ll go back to normal until the next “big thing” gets propped up.
Suits heard about this secret sauce called AI that can cut down on the need for those pesky humans that are always looking for handouts and luxuries like a living wage and benefits. The consumer will have to accept it when the only choices they’re offered are varying flavors of the same shit.
Can confirm this is absolutely true. The number of meetings I’ve been in where execs are salivating…
Whereas in reality so far the payoffs are projected to be something like 2%. Not counting the costs of developing and running the AI stuff.
(but also it doesn’t work and they are, in fact, just dumb)
And then when it doesn’t work, you blame other people and fire humans anyway and give yourself a raise for saving the company money. Stock prices rise.
They think they’ll get money.
Is why.
Unless a hyped-up investor gives it to them, they won’t.
I was discussing this with a friend. We came to the conclusion that “entrepreneur” means “unskilled, uneducated and unable to work” and that the harder a product is marketed, the more worthless it is.
A lot of business people also think that AI is a “force multiplier” meaning that if they use it they can get more done in less time. Anything that can do that is basically a money printer at the business level, which is why all these execs and companies are so excited about it.
The problem is it’s not or at least not reliably proven to be so. All these companies are jumping on board thinking “shove some AI in there and get 20% growth” when in reality there’s no backing behind it working like that. And that’s why a lot of customers are turned off, because from the consumer side, AI is just sloppy unoriginal junk. But on the business side they just see “Productivity is up” never mind that the productivity is garbage quality.
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OpenAI struck gold, NVIDIA followed suit, and everyone else bought shovels hoping to get investors even though they have no plans on striking gold (developing useful AI).
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Would you like to buy a timeshare to the moon? If we all buy, you’ll be able to sell your spot for 10x the price! Don’t wait! Spots are limited!
Nvidia is the biggest shovel seller out there.
Nvidia sells the hardware (shovels), but also develops portions of the software to make it run more efficiently, like OpenAI. Nobody else but Microsoft seems to be actually developing software, though AMD is slowly working towards having comparable performance.
We kinda need to adapt the saying now. When someone finds gold, you need to sell wood and iron for all the shovel makers that will show up.
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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.
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
They believe that we’re on the precipice of creating agi. Agi, if invented, would be like inventing the nuclear bomb. Whoever does it first gets a massive leg up on the competition. Except in this case instead of destroying a rival with a bomb you just ask your Agi, “what’s the best way to become the most profitable company in history” and it will tell you and it will be right.
No, they’re pretty much just dumb. In tech, this works along hype cycles where there’s gotta be some new thing all the fucking time, and it cures what ails ya and is perfect for every case. This mostly involves taking any actual merits of [new tech] and blowing them way out of proportion and context, making it the best thing since sliced bread. This invariably makes people invest because hype is more important than making sense. When the cycle for that particular tech winds down into the Trough of Disillusionment, a new one shows up.
It will kill us all or solve everything, step right up and place your bets! No ma’am, there is no third option to bet on, none at all I say.
