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?
It hypes investors. Investors are the customers.
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Investor FOMO
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Threatening Labor
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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.
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.
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.
I see two basic reasons.
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it gives companies plausible argument to embed telemetry into their products. Should your TV manufacturer or coffee maker manufacturer be able to monitor every single button you press on your device? Probably not, but they would like to “because AI”! Now they have an excuse to be as invasive as they want, “to serve you better”. The dream - for them - would be total surveillance of your habits to sell you more shit. Remember, it always comes back to money.
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The old adage never fails: if it’s free, you are the product. Imagine AI being so pervasive, that now everywhere you look, everything you interact with can subtly suggest things. It doesn’t have to be overt. But if AI can nudge the behavior of the masses to do a thing, like buy more soda, or favor one brand over another, then it has succeeded in boosting company bottom line. Sure the AI can do useful shit for you, but the true AI problem companies want to solve is “say or do the right shit to influence this consumer to buy my thing”. You are the target the AI is operating on. And with billions of interactions and tremendous training, it will find the optimal way to influence the masses to buy the thing.
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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.
For the same reason blockchain was hyped for a while.
Oh dude but so many great and useful applications came out of blockchain that are completely unrelated to crypto… /s
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.
(but also it doesn’t work and they are, in fact, just dumb)
It’s all a sunk-cost fallacy. They’ve dumped all of this money into it, so therefore they have to double down on it.
Especially if they’re trying to get a bunch of money from Wall Street and other investors.
The biggest contributor being all of these companies believe they can now just lay off a bunch of workers and make up the difference with these LLMs even though they are not at all a replacement for humans.
Less workers, less people that have to pay, and more money can be funneled to the top.
And don’t forget: companies are just a group of people, and they can fall for a good hyped up scam as easily anyone else.
It attracts investors in the company not customers.
