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 delights me to lie to myself that they are nervous someone somewhere would pick a golden ticket with their AI application and they’d miss out. But more obvious explanation for big corpos is that they hide problematic data-mining, content appropriation, ad personalization and other stuff behind this curtain, maybe not for these crude tools alone, but to force a precedent into existence that they can do it whenever they like in the future. They make you give up your personal stonks for a shiny penny that is corporate LLM genies and they probably pay a lot to showcase their beauty at loss.
Tbf, that’s exactly what happens sometimes. CVS partnered with Theranos despite the lack of evidence supporting their product. Their reasoning was that if only Walgreens partnered with Theranos and it was a success, then CBS would have been screwed