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?

  • @conciselyverbose
    4•1 month 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.

    • SavvyWolfEnglish
      1•1 month 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
        1•1 month 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.