As detailed in a new study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, researchers presented 1,000 respondents with questions and descriptions of products. Surprisingly — or perhaps not, depending on your perspective — they found that products described as using AI were consistently less popular.

“When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions,” said lead author and Washington State University clinical assistant profess of marketing Mesut Cicek in a statement. “We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products.”

https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-products-ai

A Washington State University and Temple University study, published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management and also cited in The Wall Street Journal, titled “Adverse impacts of revealing the presence of ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ technology in product and service descriptions on purchase intentions: the mediating role of emotional trust and the moderating role of perceived risk”, concludes what seems like common sense to many of us: when a company announces that a product is AI-powered, consumers tend to distrust it more and as a result are less inclined to buy it.

https://medium.com/enrique-dans/why-ai-powered-products-are-backfiring-with-consumers-a868bff518b0

If one listens casually to the discourse around generative AI today, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that everyone is clamoring for more AI capabilities and can't wait to use them in their daily lives. But a recent ZDNET/Aberdeen survey into AI assistants shows a clear disconnect between how much vendors are pushing AI assistants and how much users actually want these capabilities -- at least for now.

...

When asked if they would stop using a product if they couldn't turn off or remove AI assistant features, 31% said they would stop using that product (including 28% of Gen Z), with an additional 38% saying they might. With these results, one can even see that for a significant segment of users, AI assistants could actually be a negative when it comes to gaining or retaining customers.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/only-8-of-americans-would-pay-extra-for-ai-according-to-zdnet-aberdeen-research/

...I would say yes that is a reasonable generalization, not everybody hates AI but to say it is majority popular is a massive stretch.

Every time at work "I asked Gemini and here's what it said..." No. Shut the fuck up.

"self selected group of ideological refugees" describes the Fedis really well.

We are a self-selected group of tech-savvy ideological refugees.

Which does include dbzer0's explicit rejection of copyright as a source of criticism.

The FuckAI crowd treats this like a settled matter, and they're shocked whenever someone lacks a kneejerk negative response. Artists have been harassed into deleting posts when they thought animating their own paintings might be neat.

It's a moral panic. We must not do thing, because thing is the devil!, and anyone who so much as shrugs is doing the devil's work.

Lemmy understands the technology well enough that we should be able to geek out over this whole new kind of software, independent of hating the corporate bastards who foist it upon everyone.

Pressure to shove LLMs into everything because it convinced a bunch of vapid know-nothing middle managers and C-suite knobs it was “alive” and that their stock options would skyrocket has unfortunately poisoned the well of “AI”.

But yes, purpose-built ML models that are amazing and useful. And almost no one, in the grand scheme of things, is using them.

There's programs that generate porn just by describing it, and y'all are wondering if the interest in that is made-up?

You're actively blocking exposure to communities that are using AI, and then noticing "the majority userbase seems to be anti-AI."

Do you think perhaps there's a lot of people out there who are not anti-AI, but that you're not seeing them because you've found an anti-AI bubble you're more comfortable in?

Everybody hates it but like 40 million people are paying for ChatGPT which can be used for free.

I dislike the implementation of a lot of AI.

I pretty much only come across them when I need support for something, and I'm good at searching the sites for info before I go to the support. This means that the AI only gives me answers that I've already seen and that doesn't work - they always waste my time.

I am also a frequent visitor of subreddits like r/askphysics, and the amount of nonsense that comes up because the AI that people asked doesn't understand what it is saying isn't helping with my perception either. I much prefer using a search engine instead, because they don't hallucinate answers and I can validate the content of the page based on a lot of leads that you don't get if an AI copies the answer and rephrases it.

There are a lot of places where AI can be a very good tool to implement, but those are not LLM related. It can for instance be used for getting CNC machines to better correct for thermal expansion in different parts of the machine, based on the temperature and humidity of the environment, runtime, and other info like that, so more accurate machining can be achieved.

I really don't need AI in my coffee machine or toaster though. I strongly suspect that those are just data harvesters.

I've had three different co-workers hounding me about how great it is. One guy showed me how he had it write an email for him. It took him longer to enter the prompt than it would've taken to just write the email himself.

If "everyone pretty much hates it", why did chatgpt.com become the fifth-most-visited website in existence?

AI bot traffic.

Because unbelievable amounts of money have been devoted to making AI seem inveitable while these same companies have deeply enshittified traditional search engines?

Because people used to really buy into the hype of computers and a Silicon Valley sense of excitement about possibility?

Big tech is currently brutally strip mining our optimism with one of these earth strippers as if it didn't leave a barren wasteland behind and wasn't utterly unsustainable.

It isn't because ChatGPT is making money that is for sure.

While in the shower, one might think of a question. Is that not a shower thought?

Well there's no "showerasks" community

It is more of a rhetorical question to me, an observation rather than a direct question but yeah I can see that.

But they'll still be vastly outnumbered by the people who see the program do the thing and merely think 'Neat.'

I think this category is shrinking much faster than the AI ingroup thinks, and most people are moving from this group to the group that defines AI as an adjective that means "shitty and trying to manipulate you while being utterly unhelpful and wasting your time".

It is honestly disorienting that techbros are oblivious to this, especially for kids the meaning of AI in their lives is quickly becoming "the shitty sloppy thing".

Things are at a point where if I walk around on the street and ask random people to "Behave like AI" I am confident most people would start doing shitty interpretations of human behavior with weird glitches and fundamental hallucinations about the basis of the conversation.

This is not what winning looks like for AI....

A techbro is "someone who likes a technology that I, personally, dislike." Since everyone has different likes and dislikes, yeah, there'll be techbros around. Who exactly those techbros are will vary from person to person.

We may never know.

Since I follow other places outside the Fediverse, I agree that the disapproval of genAi in Lemmy is monolithic and repetitive. Mastodon also has a lot of AI-criticism, but perhaps it is more sophisticated, backed up by articles and the like. In other places, there is active research and adoption. For instance, a cybersecurity firm showed that hypnotic suggestion is a very effective jaibreaking tactic against Language Models. https://www.securityweek.com/red-teams-breach-gpt-5-with-ease-warn-its-nearly-unusable-for-enterprise/ Try explaining this to an ML user. Ai-enhanced code editors are big right now, and I have met lots of tech people that are virtually inseparable from their chatbots.

But I rarely use it, unless I have a specific type of situation where search engines are a dead end, I need to provide more context etc. This is a recent post I think provides a more informed view https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/an-ai-premortem/ . More broadly, every single time I read sth about AI on Lemmy, I feel I am witnessing the birth of anti-android rhetoric depicted in Detroit Becoming Human or even Bladerunner. It seems to me like a form of bigotry, and it was a thing that convinced me that the userbase of Lemmy is not exactly healthy. Especially ML. There must be a few of them with multiple socket puppet accounts, or they are all just parroting the same points. Ironic how they are the biggest fans of a (poorly understood) stochastic parrot theory, when they are the same people who have been persuaded that Signal is not a "really private" messenger. There is a couple topics where you see how brain dead these people are, AI is one.

The echo chamber part is what gets me. I've gotten downvoted and had people argue that I must be pro-ai because I disagreed on details of how AI works, the difference between AI and LLMs, or exactly how we address the issues it's causing.

I think most of our current generative AI isn't fit for purpose for most of what people are saying it can do.
I think it's unfortunate that generative AI has entirely coopeted the term AI, which is a much broader field.
I think labeling LLMs as plagiarism machines and trying to stop them under current copyright law is destined to failure because there isn't enough difference between what's clearly acceptable and what people are unhappy about. We need a new, deliberately thought out way of addressing "you can download my stuff and mush it about with a computer if that's what you need to perceive it as a human. If you're mushing it about to analyze and make a copy cat, then you can't have it". The function of copyright is to promote innovation, and while generative AI isn't violating our rules for copyright, it's clearly working contrary to the intent of our current system.