Just give me a human being or a plain voice menu.

Businesses just don’t want to pay people if they can help it. Some things are inefficient. Get over it.

It’s why enshitification is so common. Create a tool that quantifies quality in a usable way as a metric and you change the entire economy.

Plus, the first time you encounter it, it doesn't identify itself as a bot for a couple sentences. And it's convincing enough that you fall for it. The feeling of being let down and realizing that you were just talking to a chump robot is severe, and is now associated with my dentist's brand.

VS. the inadequacy of ai systems (nondeterministic output, no reference with reality, unknown signal to noise ratio, low effort etc).

Of course nothing beats a human with real agency at the company but like, these modern agents could be 100x better than what airlines and internet service providers currently have.

Agreed.

A local pizza place (Tribute Pizza) switched its phone over to an AI assistant that goes out of its way to appear human to such a degree that it inserts random "restaurant bustle" sound effects into the call so it sounds like you're talking to someone standing in a crowded restaurant.

The subterfuge of layering in sound effects to make idiots think they were still talking to a human was a bridge too far and I swore off ever giving my business to them again.

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 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.

The tech takes a while to diffuse like any other but I think call centers don't have a great outlook

If I'm looking at a product and want to search the reviews for the keyword "battery life" and see what real, actual people are experiencing, I can't do that anymore. A search for "battery life" in Rufus always returns some nonsense like "Many customers report good battery life, while others say it's runtime is shorter than expected". I want human experience! I want specifics! Why is everything sanded down to "good or bad"?

To the extent that AI adds value, it is being captured, rather than going back to the consumer.

What a conundrum! Why oh why are consumers reacting this way?

I suspect someone is selling these to dentists in particular. Dentists have cash to burn on these kinds of solutions, I guess.

The real solution would be the ability to block AI-generated adverts completely in your browser, forcing advertisers to send you non-AI ads if they want your attention.

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".

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!”

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?

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.

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.

- "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.

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.

To speak from a step further along the cynicism scale [0], I submit that "voting with your eyeballs" is just a weaker form of "voting with your wallet", and that in turn is a trap [1] which empirically doesn't work and is cynically-promoted in order to dis-empower people.

[0] "Aaaacktually, the real real problem is..."

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/

No one cares about plagiarism and artists.

I bet lots of people would even be happy that artists get smacked because they see only high profile and rich artists.

Normal people don’t care about AI and are not afraid that it will take their jobs.

They are pissed off because of they are paying customers they expect some level of respect.

AI bots are slap in the face, they ask basic stuff that human operator should infer from the conversation. But you are hit with a dummy that doesn’t solve any of your issues and have to spend time explaining yourself.

Funny part is that’s exactly the same as low income lvl 1 support.

But there is no comparison study. My idea is people are equally pissed off by lvl 1 support that they have to explain stuff in detail and get no real resolution.

Incidentally, this is why I will never buy a Tesla. I used to want one pretty badly, I thought (and still think tbh) that they are very cool cars. I was even willing to barely tolerate using a touchscreen as the only interface. But to make that work safely, the controls need to be in the same exact place every time so that I can learn to manipulate them without looking at the screen. Moving stuff around willy nilly like Tesla does isn't just annoying, it's actively unsafe. So I'm not buying one and never will, because they have proved I can't trust them to act right.

Just the other day I was trying to fix someone's laptop and reflexively pressed (what I thought was) the context menu key, only to find no context menu opened, and instead a Copilot window right in the middle of the screen.

A peculiar way to call VC vultures with neck deep vested interests.

It seems half of them spend their spare time woodworking or gardening.

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 incentives are perfectly aligned for all of us to absolutely hate interacting with call centers, especially automated ones.

I mean I agree with you just that the popular perception of that word has changed

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.

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....

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.

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.

most big ai will never compensate anyone

* 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.

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 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?

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.

Or sometimes basic image recognition.

I was just trying to schedule my daughter's dentist appointment and had to spend 10 minutes talking to an AI when I could have found a time that worked in 30 seconds with a human. And at the end of the whole process, she got my daughter's name wrong. It was demoralizing.

I assure you, the Android Open Source Project made no such change.

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.

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."

I have no idea how to go about implementing such a thing, but it would be cool if someone picked up the idea and ran with it.

I realize the decision makers have been prioritizing the opposite. Making calls take as long as possible but I have no idea what is incentivizing them to do that.

> 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.

bTW - I stopped watching Netflix.

Most artists never got radio money because it went into a label slush fund and was spent retaining the tent pole artists.

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.

The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.

Radio didn't pay much, but it was promotion for the album.

Spotify doesn't pay much, and it _replaces_ the album.

I have the opposite issue, can generative washing recover the lost odd socks somehow?

> 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.

Everyone would prefer a nicer handmade chair (if not by the price difference).

Chairs are not comparable to OPs cards; writing on a card costs nothing (but intent, which seems to be in low stock these days).

Finally, factoring in the real operating cost, ongoing capital costs, and environmental/social externalities, the AI chair in your example would cost something like 1000x a handmade chair.

No, not at all. That was a chief complaint. Grandma doesnt give a fuck about machine learning, why are they advertising it?

> 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.

Right. And that's why this isnt an example of the phenomena. Nowhere did I say machine learning was useless.

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

I never said it was as overused. I said we levied the same criticisms (buzz word, implementation detail, bad fit)

Im surprised people dont remember this. Here are some examples:

- Blind post from 2018 stating machine learning is a buzz word with lots of agreement: https://www.teamblind.com/post/is-machine-learning-bullshit-...

- Tech crunch article from 2020 calling machine learning a buzz word and noting how its advertised prominently: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/25/when-that-ai-company-isnt-...

- Substack article from 2017 challenging tech companies on if they really need ML: https://makecents.substack.com/p/https-medium-com-medhaa-att...

- Article saying 90% of machine learning is just "linear regression in a trench coat" but people are labeling it ML for marketing purposes: https://www.eigenmagic.com/2022/03/22/linear-regression-is-b...

- More blind posts saying ML is overhyped: https://www.teamblind.com/post/is-ml-a-hype-gxtuchm0, https://www.teamblind.com/post/is-machine-learning-overhyped..., https://www.teamblind.com/post/when-will-this-ai-hype-die-8z...

- hackernews thread for article and comments claiming its overhyped, over-applied etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149532

Note that I am NOT arguing ML is useless. It's not useless. I'm saying people made these same criticisms they make against AI: buzz word, implementation detail, often unnecessary.

It's funny to me that people forget this. I agree the AI buzz is more pervasive. But thats a difference in degree and not kind.

They received some money up front in a contract to record the album, and the label make the money from sales.

There is a reason the bands toured and sold teeshirts.

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.

And there it is.

Netflix was just an example. There are other services.

One is the method of recording a message, the other is having something else completely draft a message for you.

The importance of a personal message is not just in the visual appearance or delivery, but that there has to be some emotional loading to even put the effort into drafting one.

With AI, it's a stupid prompt to get it to write trite poesy. It's meaningless and empty at its root. It's discourse with a nullity.

Nobody who values the human connections in their lives wants that. No matter what kind of marketing and fine print gets shoved and manipulated into their lives.

When Netflix started to be online only I tagged along, and it was OK-ish - selection was not that great but but price was not big either and once in a while I would watch a movie. Today ads are very intrusive and the cost for no ads is $20 / month- which is not worth it for me. Compared to this, piracy is clearly a superior choice.