AI, among non-tech people means two things: slop and shitty customer service bots.
To put it simply, the last few decades have been about glorifying the average Simpson. KISS and Marvel movies. Trump-level speech. And now along comes something that is going to take the pain of deep complicated thinking away (what a relief!), but the damn villain not only walks the talk[^1], it also unfortunately talks the talk with complicated words, correct capitalization and (gasp!) em--dashes. What's not to hate about it?
[^1]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192777/walk-the-...
A good story here is notion: I don’t think they (only) stuck AI features. They made it possible for me to use it from AI. This is meaningfully different because it enables * composability *.
I record my notes in Notion using Apple Watch and summarise them or use them through Claude account which has a plugin to Notion.
Now think about it: employees in notion wont think of this as an amazing feature because it is utterly simple to implement. There’s no limelight or anything. If they had made some fancy AI integration within notion to autocomplete or whatever, the optics are better internally. But outside it is lukewarm to bad.
I wish more companies enable composability instead of bespoke AI integration within their application.
To my amazement I picked up a, grifty “hair regrowth” supplement. Right on the top of the box, they had the text: “AI TECHNOLOGY”
If you want to know what the fuck is happening to this country you just have to understand that we’re at a point where a company finds it even worth slapping an obvious grift on an obvious grift because there’s enough low IQ idiots to buy.
The mood has shifted dramatically, but that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone that never leaves tech circles where it’s still all AI all the time.
Feels like the old iThing or eWare trends of the 00s. New thing, new marketing trend.
This isn't unique to tech, either. In recent years, I've started to notice all the advertising around me increasingly targeting businesses and investors rather than the average person. Feels like we're quickly moving towards a post-consumer society, in which trying to convince the average middle class consumer to buy your product is no longer relevant, because that's simply not where the money is anymore.
The toaster brand is just trying to fool people. Something like Mythos is actually what's driving change.
In tech, Microsoft is a big reason for this turnoff. First, they forced Copilot onto Windows users. Second, they decided to market "AI PCs" by forcing AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to put NPUs into their SoCs. But a tiny NPU is no match for frontier LLMs. Therefore, customers are sold on their PCs having something as good as ChatGPT built in but in reality, it's barely powerful enough to fix your grammar.
Everyone around me, including my elderly parents, love using ChatGPT. Go to any coffee shop and you'll see ChatGPT on nearly everyone's laptop. People aren't turned off by OpenAI or Anthropic. They're turned off by everyone else.
- AI loves to use "consumers" instead of just saying people or Americans
- "You’ve spent time and budget on it, yet your audience can’t name a single company they think is doing it well. "
- "The small moments that used to make the web worth visiting are disappearing."
- "The brand that builds that recognition first gets to define the standard."
Nearly every sentence has an AI-ism...
if there's anything worse than LLM-written text, it's websites that rally against LLMs and AI-use, then blatantly just use AI to do the thing they're against
if you're going to be anti-ai, at least don't use it!!
Yet a third or so of HN submissions are about AI BS. Just another confirmation techdorks are out of this world.
That episode was based on the musical The Music Man, FWIW
E.g. Spotify is using AI extensively, consequently I expect them to reduce the price very soon. Maybe like a 50% cut.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2025/nov/07...
why does this happen to you?
I wouldn't let these toaster companies and Microsoft distract from the actual progress in SOTA AI.
A toaster company saying their product now has AI is actually turning people off.
Another stat I've heard, but can't cite at the moment, is that only 7% of Americans use ChatGPT daily - I think it is likely a bit older than 2025, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to 10 or 20% now.
Everybody lives in their own bubble, and it can be easy to believe that you're in-touch with the public-at-large. That's why you gotta fact-check this stuff.
I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many.
What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!"
You might as well market it as "created by child labor".
So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.
One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.
I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!
This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.
In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).
I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.
And millions of people know exactly what I mean.
Among a larger % of my tech friends, AI is cool.
Among my non-tech friends, AI has been uncool.
Among by artist friends, AI has been really uncool for years.
I’m personally in a “water is wet” position.
In many cases "AI" signals some sort of betrayal to users, because it shows that the developer CAN drastically change the GUI to implement features it wants to implement, except in practice "AI" isn't a feature that provides tangible benefits to the user.
So you get the feeling of "you could have done this this WHOLE time?" + the fact they didn't do it for you but just to say they are using AI now.
If the developer wanted to please the users, they would instead implement features that users have been demanding for a while. That got a lower priority so that AI that nobody asked for could be implemented.
AI generated media (art, music, etc) is very repulsive to interact with and so many products feel like they have led with AI solutions to problems that don't exist.
My unpopular opinion is that many or maybe most people don’t care about this.
They don’t care about where the content came from or if the artists get paid for the work. If they can get something (an answer to their question, some output that finishes their homework, some writing for a work assignment) more easily and with less cost or effort then they want it that way.
Look at piracy for a similar topic: It’s not even a derivative work, it’s just taking straight from the artists while bypassing their payment ask. Yet even on Hacker News every piracy thread fills up with piracy apologia and people saying artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output or that IP rights shouldn’t exist. Many people just don’t care about this stuff even when it’s direct source content taken 1:1 without paying. They definitely don’t care if the tool they’re using to do their homework or write that work email was trained on it.
I've talked to doctors, drivers, lawyers etc. and most white collar and many blue collar jobs feel the threat. Which, based on various news, feel justified even if not immediate. Even if its not the same llm per se, but the word "AI" is already tarnished as scum backstabbing negative entity, I literally don't know a single person who sees it these days positively.
Whatever reasons there were to be excited about tech have been subsumed by the things to be worried about.
For most users "AI" probably just means "chatbot" - and that's not compelling, because they can already access a chatbot, why would they want one in every product they use?
The more advanced features / workflows that LLMs can enable are kind of opaque if your points of reference are the ChatGPT web interface and summaries of search results on google.com - one reason that "agent" or "harness" have become useful jargon is that it distinguishes the tool we use and what it can do from the tech that backs it.
We then rebranded it as "Advanced Search," kept the sparkle icon and everything, literally just a find-and-replace of instances of "AI" with "Advanced," pretty much.
The negative feedback stopped. The very next day someone wrote in and said it was an incredible feature.
Branding is wild. The modern media environment is wild. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong to hate on AI. But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain, even if the discussion in question has zero bearing on their job. There's polling on this and job security is far and away the populace's biggest concern related to AI.
“That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”
The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.
It has an equally negative connotation to a rather large portion of the tech-savvy population as well.
Here’s a perfect example. Square recently rolled out “managerbot”. I was like “oh, cool” because I actually wanted something like that. I asked it a few questions about the data in my system, most of which it couldn’t answer. On top of that, it was as slow as molasses. I could pull the report and get the information myself faster than that bot could do anything. Square isn’t the only one. Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, etc. They are all guilty of it.
Personally, I like using AI tools, but I’m experiencing the marketing fatigue too. Developers are putting it into everything, doing it badly and then pitching it as a central feature.
I guess it’s the natural cycle of things though. We are somewhere around the peak hype -> disillusionment part of the cycle.
Okay… what does that mean?
This anti consumer crap, that people demonstrably hate, worked! It worked to increase share price. We should all see that as a a fundamental failure of the market to transmit information about what brings the consumer value. Instead, it has been rewarded to the tune of trillions of dollars, a huge segment of society's resources.
There is a sense among level-headed people that the market is irrational "right now," but it's been years of this shit. When do we call a spade a spade?
They are tired of hearing AI as a buzzword and having it shoehorned into every app and service they use. Most AI features have been rushed to market to check a box to say a company has an AI strategy, but they don’t work well. They’re just changing a familiar UI and popping up annoying notices.
Everyone also really doesn’t like consuming other people’s AI produced content. They associate it with slop on social media, fake headlines that tricked them, and low quality work their coworkers dump on them to waste their time. Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office.
But most everyone thinks their own AI output is the exception: They like being able to type a couple sentences into ChatGPT and have it tell them something or produce some output that would have taken more time if they did it manually.
But those strengths come with serious limitations, and huge society-level trade-offs. Annihilating the power grid in exchange for poorly formatted Powerpoint slides is not really a worthwhile exchange.
For most other products, like my cellphone, AI has no benefit except to further degrade my privacy, experience, environement, and battery life. Ditto for many other products with shoehorned AI.
Sadly for me this was my engineering manager
So they go all pointy-haired boss about insisting it gets shoehorned into everything.
Many CEOs, actually including tech CEOs, are in the foothills of the Dunning Kruger journey on much of the operations of their own businesses. They just don’t know what they don’t know, yet.
The peak cringe is the mixture of both: convolutes of texts massing buzzwords, links and sales tactics.
This feel like a rip off and a huge time waste.
And lets not talk about LinkedIn: a dumpster for AI generated content, the companies should be ashamed of. Do they actually read what they produce? No, not really.
It is pure insolence and puts them in a bad spot, at least in my book.
It's blatant marketing to investors, not users. How anyone can still have doubts about "you are the product now, not the customer" is beyond me.
Everyday folk have never cared much about any specific technology, only the experience, and the overwhelming majority of AI retrofits are lazily conceived from a user experience standpoint.
No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)
"AI" to me means the exact same thing
company wants to cut costs by eliminating human labor to increase profits
it means things are going to be wildly inconvenient with limited options
it ALWAYS means it's going to be worse
Hide your "AI", no-one is impressed or excited about it, quite the opposite
If it's a website, if I can't block your "AI" via javascript, I'll do it via CSS
Sorry but I'm skeptical.
What's the government doing about this? They're stripping the EPA os the power to regulate pollution [2] and suing in support of xAI's gas turbines [3].
Anger about AI is in part a reflection of anger about declining material conditions where corporations and the ultra-wealthy can increasingly stomp over regular cities with impunity while getting ever-richer.
The state's response is going to get ever-more violent and extreme. Over-charging in federal courts, over-policing and violence against peaceful protestors as the law enforcement arm of the government increasingly takes off the mask regarding being the security apparatus for the protection of capital.
Automation (including AI) could be a good thing for society as people would have to work less and we could automate away more dangerous, menial and low-paid work, improving the material conditions for everyone. We don't live in that world.
[1]: https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/11/nx-s1-5678273/trump-epa-clima...
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-help...
There are real dated gaps that have formed thanks to the non-tech hype people.
We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face.
Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively making a worse UI and often providing little to no benefit.
Most consumers don’t actually care how their tech works, just that it does and gives them benefits.
I really don’t look forward to this new world, AI is a powerful and useful too for creators but it will and already is used for all the wrong reasons, apparently even to pick which targets to destroy in war, essentially making life or death decisions in some areas with little to no oversight. And then people here think that any kind of regulation around this tech is useless and unwarranted…
Don’t get me wrong I use AI all the time but I fear it will be the most disruptive technological development in both positive and negative ways that we have ever dealt with.
When we use AI ourselves via tools like chatbots, harnesses etc. we are mostly actively choosing to do so, and have some control. We can always just decide to stop and do the work ourselves if its not working out.
In the call center/situation of companies embedding it in their products, often its not in a way that gives users the choice. They are forcing it onto their users with no other option, or at the very least they are always forced to play along with the LLM until it finally gives up.
Its user hostile since we can't decide to break out of the LLM loop when we want to.
Add on top of that most of these companies are actually forcing the use of the AI related features simply to fulfill someones KPI's/internal metrics.
If you have to scream, shout, and beg your consumers to use your AI product, you're simply doing it wrong.
What a conundrum! Why oh why are consumers reacting this way?
Or have you ever seen an advertisement for US/EU tech that said: "Developed and designed by our software experts in the Philippines", or "Call our help line and we transfer your call to India for free!"
Consumers love outsourced call centers, don't they?
QuickBooks has annoying suggestions that shift the whole UI and cannot be disabled. Misclicks now happen.
The AI in my robot vacuum is... just a label? I don't want to talk to it. I want it to deterministically clean my stuff.
My TV got an upgrade to Gemini. Why? I don't talk to the TV, and it's in my face. (I'm think about getting a device that can do Plex->Atmos streaming).
So yeah, as a signal the AI brand is about as bad as it gets. Crypto tier. But just like crypto, the investors want to see that signal regardless of any underlying substance.
A lot of what current LLMs are good at seems to boil down to translation:
* Translate some prompt into a planning list of individual TODOs
* Treat each TODO as a new translation (e.g. from TODO to code), or call some external tool (lookup something on the internet, static code analysis, database request)
* Translate the result(s) of these TODOs into a final text, or into a new TODO list
To me, this is interesting, because maybe the Homo Sapiens intelligence simply developed as a side effect of communication (translating words into actions).
People are not confused about these.
I've worked at a company whose product involved some decently advanced computer vision, marketed as AI (which isn't incorrect).
I've also seen companies that were doing machine learning before the LLM boom, who remarketed their machine-learning-based product as AI (which isn't incorrect).
> Everything is sorted out!
> Everything is now sorted out, and I hope this solution works well for you.
- Steve Jobs
Selling an “AI” product is like describing a C++ compiler as a feature to someone buying a video game
For example:
I wanted to make a pie chart in Excel of 5 cells, so I selected them and told Copilot to make a pie chart. It put a pie chart image in the chat window, and told me where to click to make the pie chart, but didn't actually make the pie chart for me.
Sometimes my phone's camera saves a picture in the wrong orientation, and I don't feel like digging around for where Google put the rotate button today. There's an easily-accessible prompt box, but it can't follow "rotate the image 90 degrees to the left".
---
The thing is, unless you use an app to do a task all the time, often it takes longer to find the button, remember the keystroke, or look it up on Google than it takes to just bang out a prompt. And, if I can tell my IDE to "write a unit test for this class" and get back something useful, why can't I tell Excel to "make a pie chart for these cells" and get back something useful?
Our customer base about 70% can’t stand AI, 20% doesn’t care, and 10% thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world.
Part of this is incentivized by investors that want everything they invest in to be an AI thingy so they can feel good about themselves. So, you have a lot of startups optimizing for that. This is not a new thing of course. Every if-else type logic got shamelessly labeled AI at some point even fifteen years ago. I've been in a few places where that happened.
Other than that, I can't see why consumers should care for most things they actually buy and pay for.
But of course they tend to fall in the feature matrix trap where when faced with choice between product A and product B, they tend to go for the one with the most elaborate spec sheet. Even if most of that is just meaningless word soup to them. True for phones, TVs, stereo equipment, cars, etc. Most people really have no clue what they are buying so they just over pay under the assumption that it will cover their needs. AI goes in a long list of meaningless marketing language that companies use to market their products. Most people say they are not sensitive to that, but their purchase choices usually tell a different story. Marketing people know that.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/coca-cola-uses-ai-to-create-a-fut...
You can already see what's coming, too. At some point in the near future, companies will make a point of offering products without AI (to whatever extent) and start offering the bespoke, organic or Classic (i.e. Mexican Coke) versions and charging even more for them.
Ask yourself, would you like to receive a christmas or birthday card with a personalized message or something produced you know was 100% produced by AI bot - even better when it has a hallucination in there.
The example I always give is when google maps got speech recognition, I could ask it "Hey google, what's the E.T.A." and it would magically respond with how long till I arrive. Somewhere along the line it broke and for years now it doesn't work... the last time I tried my phone actually brought up the web browser and did a web search. smh.
The first thing I did when they forced gemini was I went to look how to disable it. Why? It override the old voice I chose to read calender events in the morning... in fact it would start reading like normal, then that stupid gemini voice would cut in and be entirely unhelpful.
its all enshitification.
And there is some truth to that given that the features we were supposed to get in iOS 26 did not come out. But it also was just that they were not shoving AI into every single thing.
I still have hope that they will be the company that will (mostly) apply AI in a more meaningful way instead of it just being "AI magic" in everything. There were some genuinely useful things shown at WWDC.
Will have to wait and see though. I was disappointed to see them leaning more into the same branding.
The feature should speak for itself. If your feature is good you don’t need to market the underlying technology.
Like, nobody gives a shit about settings being stored in an SQLite database. They don’t care how it’s stored at all.
When my friend shows me his new phone and how crazy it is he can zoom so far into the moon you can see individual rocks - he does not give a single shit that it uses AI. He just uses the gd camera.
When you use AI to build a feature, the fact that it uses AI should not be on the tin. What it actually does and how good it is at it should be. Saying something uses AI is pointless. No matter how much the vulture class wants it, fetch is never going to happen.
- "ML is such a buzzword. Everyone is trying to shoe-horn it into their product."
- "Why are they putting 'machine learning' in their hero section? Just do the thing well. ML is an implementation detail."
- "You dont even need ML for this. Simple linear regression would be the better choice."
We are so far beyond the pale. This was a valid criticism ~5 years ago and now we remember it as the golden days.
Sure we could argue that there were times that ML was likely not really necessary, but it was still largely invisible to the user what the mechanism was.
I think about autocorrect, sentence completion (or just next word recommendation), music recommendations, etc. All of those were clearly ML but the user was not made aware of that at every step of using them and in many cases it being ML was only in technical documents or the original announcement.
Now obviously there are exceptions to this, but it was the exception that shoved ML in your face compared to the current situation around AI.
The last one is a traditional nerd criticism though, it has been present on HN for the last ~20 years. Kind of ignorable.
Or sometimes basic image recognition.
It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:
> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.
Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.
Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.
It seems half of them spend their spare time woodworking or gardening.
I mean I agree with you just that the popular perception of that word has changed
The same argument is used to justify normal piracy: The consumer thinks they’re stealing from the corporation who distributes it, not the artist.
In C-suites AI appears to be some kind of limitless source of goodness and profits, so companies must optimise hard for it, or risk getting left behind.
Everyone else is either "Has some uses if you steer it carefully" or "Hell no."
And therefore probably in users' minds, when you say "AI", they think of all the badly done ones, not the good ones, because they didn't notice the good ones as AI. So when you advertise it as AI, that's a negative.
* My vibe coding machine goes brrrrt and that's all I care about
* My college essay cheating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about
* My custom waifu/porn-generating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about
* The concept of AI is drawing all the investor money and that's all I care about
The common factor being self-centeredness and/or being part of a small ingroup that benefits, possibly at the expense of others.
The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.
If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth.
It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure.
Of course the reality for the actual workers on the line is that their job and industry may be disrupted and the overall benefits of that economic growth may not reach them during their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was followed by a century of major and sometimes violent disputes over the relationship between corporations and labor and the rights of workers.
The post-WWII promises of convenience and leisure were replaced by the reality of the baseline adjusting and households needing to work the same or even more combined hours to make ends meet.
Even if the optimistic levels of economic growth occur, the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed.
A peculiar way to call VC vultures with neck deep vested interests.
> Sure!
>> Ok, I'm connecting you to a human now.
[5 minutes later]
> Hello?
>> Hi! What can I help you with?
> Are you a human?
>> No, I'm an AI agent programmed to help you with anything you need. What can I do for you?
> You said you were going to connect me to a human.
>> That isn't something I can do. What can I help you with?
Turns out "connecting to a human" is something it knows about in its training data so it'll hallucinate doing so.
Most egregiously: VSCode.
No, i absolutely never in my life will want Copilot to summarize anything for me and yet guess what button appeared in the UI and i accidentally clicked on last night....
I suspect that, in many cases, AI features actually make a product more expensive for the operator. Imagine how much of doordash's money you could burn by telling its chatbot that the only way for you to figure out where the driver left your order is to create a todo app in React.
Spotify was praised as an alternative to piracy that gave some money to artists at a price that consumers wouldn’t complain too much about.
You don’t have to look at Spotify, though. Look at all of the people who won’t even pay Spotify or Netflix rates for content because they know they can pay $0 to pirate it.
bTW - I stopped watching Netflix.
> I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
I don’t know what plan you were on, but mine doesn’t have ads.
This kind of proves my point, though: People don’t want to pay for things (including the ad-free level) so they use it to justify piracy as being superior for various reasons.
At the risk of over generalising, I mostly hear a lot of shit talk from younger generations, distrust from millennials, and more excitement and interest from Gen-x-ish and older.
As with many things, there's a certain level of hypocrisy to the shit talking, because teachers are at the schools are complaining to parents about the kid's use of AI, and pointing out that they will automatically fail any writing that seems to be using AI.
most big ai will never compensate anyone
Most artists never got radio money because it went into a label slush fund and was spent retaining the tent pole artists.
Radio didn't pay much, but it was promotion for the album.
Spotify doesn't pay much, and it _replaces_ the album.