Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.

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.

Also the product itself is likely to suck.

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.

I think you may be right. I enjoy tech and programming, but hardly any of my friends/family do. And nearly everyone in my inner circle (an admittedly small number of people, considering I'm an extreme introvert) condemns and avoids AI both for the reasons you mentioned and because they refuse to "outsource my brain to AI!"

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.

I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists.

But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.

I actually don’t think most consumers care about that at all. Consumers loved Napster. They have no problem stealing from artists outright, let alone indirectly.

I think to consumers AI denotes lack of accountability or oversight. They think it might work - but it might not and no one will care.

For example, I’m doing work in standardized test prep and there are tons of new AI products and no one likes it. Consumers feel as if they will get subtle but important things wrong. Most of these companies are now trying to hide that they are using AI generated questions.

What it also hits on for the average person is the uncanny valley. It just feels bad to talk to something mimicrying a person. It feels like talking to an invader at a deep, survival level.

I think its more that AI is generally really badly implemented. It means we get a less qualitative experience, mainly on support, but also writing etc.

It only takes one attempt to contact a corporation using their new AI system to scar you, it's that dehumanizing.

And millions of people know exactly what I mean.

I’m in constant code switch mode.

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.

I think that undersells the real problem.

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.

> What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job

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.

Outside of frontier model providers, the vast majority of "AI" branded products/features just don't feel high quality.

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.

It also signals low effort or subpar quality too. Hey look we slapped gpt on our healthcare app. Is it useful? Not really but the ceo is excited about it

Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.

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.

Also translates as “this is going to be enshittified and make your life worse eventually.”

Whatever reasons there were to be excited about tech have been subsumed by the things to be worried about.

Reading the comments in this thread, I think it's difficult for some folks here to accept that many, many people outside their bubble genuinely despise what they're doing, and it's not just a misunderstanding or a matter of branding.

I believe the issue here is that, simply due to how these products came to market, "AI" is extremely vague, and slapping "AI" on every single thing makes it almost a negative signal for quality.

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.

Because using AI in a product description is a signal to venture capital if private and investors if public, that your stock price deserves to go up.

every shitty feature has someone "writing in to tell you how "incredible" it is. Its not a proof that you think it is.

dont let that fool you into thinking "users were too stupid to undestand our awesome feature so we had to dumb it down for them"

That sounds a lot like trying to deceive your users.

All people I know hear when they hear AI is - they are automating art, there are layoffs incoming, they want to build a data centre next to me that will make my electricity costs go up, they are automating the consumer help call center.

The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.

> having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population.

It has an equally negative connotation to a rather large portion of the tech-savvy population as well.

also, if you haven't heard someone refer to something as _-slop, you don't get out much

AI tech is neutral - some good, some bad, and the bad is oversold compared to other industries. (Most people have no idea how incredibly ecologically destructive paper + print are.)

But the tech was captured and adopted by marketing-think and corporate opportunism. And that's the real problem.

Both were toxic plagues before AI. And as an amplification technology, AI has enabled them to unprecedented levels of fail.

aye. I work with AI every day in an IT role and at this point I am painfully aware of its strengths and limitations. And it does have strengths.

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.

> Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office.

Sadly for me this was my engineering manager

LLMs are replacing a lot of the inflexible phone menus, and in leading implementations, can do all of the things a human could do. Or at least, make a recommendation for things it can't do that just require a human to hit an accept button.

AI is not a product, though

The explicit and overt messaging from AI companies in the West is directly and loudly claiming their goal is to put people out of work.

In a society where we've normalized "wage slave or death by starvation", yeah, you're gonna get backlash.

Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who picks up random tools, unrelated to AI, because AI is advertised.

Usually when I see people see a pop-off for Try our AI assistant I hear "Fuck off" or "leave me alone" while they close it. It's like everything has a modern Clippy.

Personally I do see it as a VC signal, as if they gave up on making a good tool and started working on slopifying it.

60% is lower than I imagined, tbh. Most people aren't doing agentic workflows and AI is likely not a selling point.

> Rich people are stealing all the jobs.

The AI promoters are themselves saying these things because it is the positive case for their business, that other businesses can pay them for AI services that are cheaper and better than keeping existing jobs.

> Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.

> “Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sa...

Got any sources for those claims that show how broadly adopted ai is in those countries? I lookes at japan and china and could find a few articles, the anime one cites a single anime made with ai and nothing about its reception and similar results for china

You think this is the media's fault? The media didn't force Altman and Amodei to tell everyone they were about to lose their jobs. The media didn't force Microsoft and Google to push half-cocked AI features into all of their products. The media didn't concoct secretive deals with municipalities so that residents didn't know data centers were being built in their neighborhoods until it was too late.

The AI industry has caused every single issue that it faces. It's absurd that you can't see this. "The media" barely even means anything anymore as the current landscape is so fractured. Who are you even talking about? Ed Zitron?

A lot of those developing nations use it specifically to produce useless slop. Blog spam from India is also very common.

I do use AI myself and don't believe its worthless, but I believe its only useful when you ask it fairly specific questions, with data it can consume publicly like "whats the rules for XYZ in this standard and if i do this problem like this in this way would that comply with those rules?" Type of thing.

I've also found it useful for programming (but often does miss things or do things a long-handed way) you have to be very careful about the results and not simply accept it because it appears to work, so it still requires a human to have a brain.

I'm not at all surprised that consumers dislike AI in this way because of the way its used, eg to replace help desk support, and create further distance between consumers and the companies they do business with. That's generally 100% how those companies use it because that is how AI companies have marketed it to executives.

Only now are we seeing posts from those people saying "waahh tokens cost too much how long till we can build our own AI". Which is another point in itself business workflows should be resilient and not heavily dependent on the cost of openai or anthropic tokens to be competitive. If these two companies can simply turn up the money knob and make your business have a huge risk then that's bad.

Also 100% we need to have sovereignty. We cannot depend on a single country to provide AI infrastructure. They can just shut it off whenever they feel like it. Maybe this week it's Fable/Mythos, and next week it's an entire country because Donald is unhappy and wouldn't "make a deal" on some thing he wants.

The problem is that many people recognize it for what it is (not real AI), and they are against society paying large cost for its advancement AS IF it is true AI or a path to it.

And rightly so

> The media is actively instilling hate for AI.

> Data centers are evil. Water is being destroyed. Eight whole rivers are drained to make a cat jpeg.

> Rich people are stealing all the jobs.

That would be a rare occurrence of the media doing its job because literally all of those things are true.

One difference between China and the US is that China won't allow data centers to jack up electricity prices, make things more expensive, be an environmental nightmare or create an unemployment crisis. None of those guardrails exist the US and honestly most Western "democracies".

Maybe there wouldn't be this reaction if we didn't have an affordability crisis and our government wasn't just 5 companies in a trench coat doing its best to do the largest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a different attitude to AI.

I read a thing awhile ago that companies are increasingly resentful of having to go through you to get your money and I think about that often because it feels like the most accurate description of living in 2026.

Most of the media is owned by tech billionaires, the Murdochs and other Trump allies, so that's an odd conspiracy theory.

[dead]

But that's the rare exception. Almost nobody prefers an artisanal chair over one from IKEA, especially when they see the price tag.

Hallmark built a brand on creating generic messages in card.

Oh my gosh, thank you for writing this so that I know I'm not going insane. I keep thinking there's no way things have gotten worse, like maybe I'm miss remembering? But I was pretty sure I wasn't miss remembering

There is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles. Or at most there was a quick reference to "ML" when a feature was announced but it wasn't shoving "ML is doing this THIS" in every UI it could.

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.

This is only true on HN. My parents and siblings and cousins and non-technical friends don't even know what the fuck ML or Machine Learning is ... but they all hate AI because they have seen everything AI gets pushed into now sucks and are tired of the AI slop on Facebook and in their Google searches.

Citation needed. Machine Learning was NOWHERE NEAR as overused as AI in user-facing communication.

The last one is a traditional nerd criticism though, it has been present on HN for the last ~20 years. Kind of ignorable.

The situation with Apple is what really annoys me about this entire situation, they clearly felt pressure because there was article after article about "Apple falling behind" on AI.

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.

On the other hand, one of my recent launch posts received comments such as "this is the sort of thing that is now possible with AI!", when I didn't use any AI at all.

Strangely enough, I don't recall any companies advertising to consumers that they outsourced.

Yes, but everyone kept it as quiet as possible.

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!"

True, but companies seem more likely to publicly brag about their use of AI than about outsourcing their call center to another country.

Bombs existed before nukes. Is anti-nuke sentiment illegitimate?

> That mentality existed well before AI. See out-sourcing.

Consumers love outsourced call centers, don't they?

Never waste a good alreadism!

Sure! But it's now more convenient when it's written up-front in the company name!

It’s terrible marketing. Telling someone “the product I’m selling will make you jobless and have no value to society” isn’t very persuasive. Outsourcing was not something promoted to the masses.

I think that's where it goes, yes. The ability to model the world internally predates spoken language. We (and other animals) already translate what we _sense_ into that internal model. Language is just another translation; all communication is bidirectional translation, internal modeling/thought is wordless.

Before calling it a day, this chatbot actually apologized for answering 3 hours too late because there were so many request at the moment.

No that's not true.

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).

Apart from when they're talking about AI generated videos or images, or the marketing people talking about an AI powered rice cooker https://tefalph.com/cooking-appliances/easy-rice-plus-rice-c... or people watching films where an AI takes over

It also means Diffusion in the context of images and videos.

Maybe I missed the /s, but why do we have to spend our time "looking at content" if it's just full of AI slop?

Hey I mean AI is supposed to make us 10x more productive, so the price of things should also go down 10x right?

...right?

right lmao. delusional

There's a big chance that you work at a company that does exactly that

For the purposes of this discussion, we all do: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

I mean, not really? I did make it. Thought it would be interesting. Is that I mentioned the name of a company I used?

That's my feeling too - that and Microsoft Windows being one of the most egregious examples of forced AI features.

I wouldn't let these toaster companies and Microsoft distract from the actual progress in SOTA AI.

my toasters have all been the opposite, once you warm it up with the first batch, the next batch actually gets more toasted than the first one, even with the same setting.

You wouldn't need AI for this; deterministic programming would be enough (and scads cheaper).

I have a Sage toaster (Brevile in some markets) which does exactly this, even has a progress bar that counts down when your toast will popup.

Boring cheap old school toasters can make as many toasts as you want. You dont cool them before making toasts, you warm them up and then do toasts.

even a kalman filter would be overkill for this. Just buy a toaster that isn't terrible, the calibre of hardware needed for this costs $0.02 for a pack of 10 - thats the level of cheapness needed to make a toaster that bad.

Umm my toaster doesn’t have this problem and it’s not AI …

why does this happen to you?

Nah, Anthropic is the leading AI company.

A toaster company saying their product now has AI is actually turning people off.

The average person uses ChatGPT daily. This average person hates how their toaster, washing machine, pencil, eraser now all have "AI capabilities".

  That includes a 58% majority of adults under 30.

  has roughly doubled since summer 2023.