Mastodawn

Randulo.com (Randy)

I'm in no way an AI hater. It has some very good use cases. But in the commercial world, if you are promoting a product or service, the phrase "AI-powered" translates to "didn't read the room". The majority probably don't see that as a plus? (I could be wrong!)

Boost if you will to get coverage. The results will be interesting if enough people vote.

EDIT: I should have said "hater or lover". But the question was strictly concerning the use of that language in promo and advertising.

AI-powered is a positive thing

0.7%

AI-powered is a negative thing

99.3%

Poll ended at Mar 19 at 6:46am.

Aral Balkan Mar 16

@randulo So fuck the environment, the real issue is branding?

Virginicus Mar 16

@aral @randulo IME, when someone has actually done something clever, they tell you exactly what they did. When they say something vague like“AI”, they’re covering something up.

Randulo.com (Randy)Mar 18

@Virginicus @aral or they don't know.

@aral @randulo It's not what they are saying

gnaddrig Mar 17

@aral @randulo
No, but branding is something one can legitimately think and talk about.

ahistorical immaterialist Mar 16

@randulo it's usually just a lie. It's not "powered" anything, in 99% of cases it means "we've replaced our call centre staff with a chatbot" or "we added a button that lets you summarise something the exact same way as 6 other pieces of software you already have installed", or maybe "we let machine learning algorithm to set prices in a way to maximally rip you off personally"

@jimbob @randulo In the case of “AI-Powered” computers, it means, this computer needs to be connected to a proprietary centralized rental service to use all of it’s features.

Je ne comprends pas Mar 16

@randulo But what are these very good use cases?

Androcat Mar 16

@zebulonmysterioso @randulo

"Firing some people in order to increase investor dividends"

Omnivore Mar 16

@zebulonmysterioso @randulo

What is the word that means [describe situation]? LLMs are useful as an interactive thesaurus.

degenerating degenerate Mar 16

@zebulonmysterioso @randulo If you write code, fact is today's coding AIs are great. If you explained what you can do with them in 2026 to someone to 2016, they would just laugh in disbelief.

If you don't write code, well, naturally this is hard to feel. But that's why there are two different camps about it.

Heckin' Chonker Mar 16

@hopeless @zebulonmysterioso @randulo In my experience they still need a human providing guard rails. In the hands of novice devs they often just enable massive amounts of slop.

Matthew Martin Mar 16

@randulo Businesses have stakeholders, any of which can tank the company. Customers, investors, government, community. AI is for investors, it is the promise of replacing labor with capital and redirecting that income to investors. I don't think it will play out that way, but no one asked me. Customers we're not asked and that's my marketing exists, so the opinion of consumers won't matter, just change the consumers mind with ads.

Toilet full of bugs Mar 16

@randulo If I see any kind of 'AI' label on a product it puts me off using it. It might as well say 'contains unreviewed slop'. If pouring slop into your product doesn't diminish its quality, it was a lousy product anyway.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Mar 16

@randulo honestly there should be an option called "it depends". For apps like Confluence, Bear, Notion AI can be a game changer. For some not so much. If you need to synthesize large amounts of info, llms are the way to go, and a lot of the AI powered apps that I found useful are those whose function is to store a lot of data

@liztai @randulo If you need to synthesize large amounts of info **and you don’t mind the enormous loss of fidelity**, llms are the way to go.

@randulo Well, I'll tell you one thing, posting this on Mastodon is going to give you pretty overwhelming votes on the negative side. It would be interesting to see a more general populace vote, but my suspicion is that negative would still win by majority. My bet is still by quite a lot.

As far as I can tell, those at the top are just wildly disconnected in every single possible way to literally everything below them. Including the systems they're actually forcing all this into...

Some, I suspect, don't even know what their own business actually is or does...

As a side note, it has struck me on more than one occasion that if there is any position in a business that could be replaced by a LLM without causing massive problems, it's the way overpaid jobs of those at the top...

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Mar 16

@nazokiyoubinbou is there any social media that is even remotely neutral about AI? Yes but it exists in China 😆 @randulo

verifiedsabakan

disability_flag

@liztai @nazokiyoubinbou @randulo and shitter, probably

verifiedsabakan

disability_flag

@randulo @liztai @nazokiyoubinbou or not, they are probably very pro ai

neocat_googly_woozy

@randulo AI dates back to Clippy.

Gen-AI is what I think you're talking about.

Gen-AI powered is a problem.

Gen-AI assisted is different.

@randulo "AI-powered" is neither a positive nor a negative thing; it's an empty placeholder for signalling "we're not behind the times". If this was meant to inform a consumer about the actual technology being used, they wouldn't be using such a broad concept (which would be equivalent to calling Tokyo "Asia"). AI has been used for a long time in a variety of cases under different names, but nobody was hearing about it. Now that LLMs have become all the rage and are talked about everywhere as "AI", companies are taking this as an opportunity to show relevancy. The sentiment being elicited depends on the individual's relation to the concept of "being/staying ahead" or immortality projects in general. However, it's not the same as the question of using AI (again, mostly LLMs or VLMs). Since I'm not aware about your goal with this survey, I can't really comment on what question would be more suitable to receive more accurate results, but I'm afraid that the range of interpretation for your current one is too broad to get a representative answer.

Olivier Stuker (he/him)Mar 16

@randulo hey @tagirijus is this the bubble you're talking about? 😂

Manuel Senfft Mar 16

@holzchopf @randulo yes, lol. :D

@randulo Generative AI has no good use cases. It chews water, land, hardware, and power in vast quantities, stealing human creative work wholesale, casting human workers aside while channelling money into the pockets of the most evil and unprincipled men on the planet, who are already wealthy beyond any reasonable measure.

Get a fucking GRIP.

Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧Mar 16

In the 50s through 70s they used to put the word "Sugar" in front of the names of breakfast cereals (to which a huge amount of crystalline sugar had been added) and it really helped them sell better. Until people finally realized how undesirable that really was and it started having the opposite effect.

bewilderbeast23 Mar 16

@randulo Pls name some good use cases. I need to know where I'm wrong when I think generative AI has none.

@randulo
The term “AI” is in itself scammy, so unyone using that either doesn’t know or care about. How is that supposed to create any positive expectation for an “AI-powered” product?

(Also your on Mastodon, redo this poll on X to get the opposite result. )

@randulo
I actually mean it: There have been companies building basien filtering techniques for decades and now their suddenly big into selling “artificial intelligence” while changing literally nothing about their product.

(“Yeah, but the customer likes to hear that!” )

toadjaune Mar 16

@randulo when I see a service boasting "AI-powered", my gut reaction is "that's probably not a good integration in your product"

Like, are you advertising your fork to be steel-powered ? Anything to be electricity-powered ? Do you advertise the database technology or the web framework your website uses ?

As a user, it shouldn't matter what technology you use to solve my problem ; only how well you solve it.

I understand that's not how marketing works in the current hype, but still :/

Erik Johnson Mar 16

@randulo Nah, I think people have seen the way most AI is used and are starting to see how this iteration of AI effects people, it's overwhelmingly negative and detrimental.

And your survey result thus far (511 people, 100% negative at the time of writing this) would seem to agree, though Mastodon has a bit of a skew to it due to it having a bit more friction than Bluesky/Twitter.

I'm an AI hater, and deeply proud of it, because I believe this iteration of AI (as in, LLM tech but also how it is used) is profoundly evil and anti-human.

Some people like to look only at the tech, in my mind this is akin to saying "If Texas wasn't counted in the 2024 election Biden would have won." They're omitting context because it's rhetorically advantageous for them.

💾 🇿🇦Mar 16

@randulo Extremist potato.

Sebastiaan Ammerlaan 🇳🇱Mar 16

@randulo I am very amused by the amount of votes 100% for the second option.

hegatherhohrnws Mar 17

@bammerlaan @randulo they were right, the amount of people makes the answer very interesting

@randulo It does not have any good use cases, let alone "very good" use cases. You too should work on your room-reading skills.

@randulo Ignoring the question of whether AI has any real use, and the second question of whether that use is genuinely available to me(the Event Horizon project is pretty neat, but the setup is completely impossible for a layman), AI-Powered means “dependent on rental from a centralized data center.” I have no interest in buying a computer that is designed to be nothing more than a terminal connecting to corporate data. Dependence on the internet is bad enough…

stony kark Mar 16

@randulo it's a synonym for garbage

Franz Graf Mar 16

@randulo fully agree.
As a customer I care about the value TO ME. I don't care about technology.

Knut 🏳️‍🌈 🇳🇴🧸Mar 16

@randulo It depends on who is promoting the product. If the product does useful things, like I've discovered Apple mail will write little brief three phrase summations of my e-mail messages...then that's great. Or mastering a sketch track in Logic, then that is useful. If it's like Microsoft where it wants to make YOU the computer and not the other way around...then no. No no no no.

@randulo Glad LLM and breathless advertising hater here, but I’ll answer this seriously.

When a product is being sold to me, I want to know what the product does, why it is better than competitors, and how its use would improve my life relative to my personal cost and to others. I read hype and emotion as demeaning to my intelligence; either sell a product as it is or stop trying to fuck with me.

“AI-powered” speaks to none of the things I want to see.
1/

@randulo Experience has shown me what purports to be “AI” is often not, so either the advertising is bullshitting/trendhopping, or the maker is not knowledgeable enough about their product or the industry it is in to understand why this is so, and worse, is shuffling more “redundant/unnecessary” human knowledge, skills, or experience onto “AI”, which puts their future work at peril.
2/

@randulo If a product does rely on algorithmic processing, describe WHAT that processing is, why it is better than humans doing it, and how humans remain in control and aware of each part of the process and that awareness and control are not threatened by the product itself. Do not put a process into a black box that I can’t see or sue and expect me to bite.
3/3

@randulo @Moss I think you can’t generalize and it’s totally up to the person perceiving the ad if it’s good or bad.

Knightmare Mar 16

@randulo I'm a complete 'AI' hater, everyone should be, 'AI' is destroying the world.

@randulo "ai-powered" tends to be a bad sign because a well crafted ai tool can advertise itself based on the merits of the tool itself, rather than just the fact that it used ai. it makes it feel like another one of those projects that just had ai crammed in because its trendy and not actually because its a good fit for the use case

Klaus Frank Mar 16

I shamelessly stole your question and put it on LinkedIn. So lets see if the sentiment is different there.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/klausfrank_ai-llm-marketing-ugcPost-7439408486695878656-RPo_

#ai #llm #marketing #ads #poll | Klaus F.

Just come across a similar poll on mastodon and the result was quite clear. 982 participants (12h before it closed) with 99% for one and 1% for the other option. But let's try the same thing on here. Link to poll on Mastodon/Fedi: https://lnkd.in/d5baBnBg #AI #LLM #marketing #ads #poll

LinkedIn

RightSprung will not comply Mar 17

@agowa338 @randulo

Many of us who won't ever sign up for LinkedIn will never see it, so be sure to put the results up here!

Terry Hancock (Director/Producer)Mar 16

@randulo

I want to know specifically what it means. I think most of the time, with televisions, they just mean it does AI upscaling of video, which can be a good thing to a point.

But what if it means "AI will review your viewing habits, share it with its corporate entity, and then use that to suggest things to you"? Then I don't want it anywhere near my house!

Maria Langer | 📝💎🌵🛥️Mar 16

@randulo @kboyd Holy crap! The results are 100% with more than 1000 votes? Read the room indeed!🤣

@randulo you are going to get very skewed results by posting this on Mastodon

Harry Wood Mar 17

@dan @randulo Yeah I'd be interested to see what the same question gets on bluesky & X.
Seems mastodon is strongly anti-AI (At least that is the sentiment it's being fashionable to vocalise on here). Also I don't think you have to be *very* anti-AI to be answering negative to this particular question.

Galaxy Map Mar 17

@harry_wood @dan @randulo There definitely seems to be a spectrum. The most anti-AI is Mastodon, then:

Mastodon > Bluesky > Threads > X > LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is full of passionate AI hypesters.

Mastodon was founded by people skeptical of US tech companies and whether it is true or not, AI is considered by many to be predominantly promoted by US companies as a scheme to keep their stock values inflated.

Drew 🇵🇭 ♾️Mar 17

@galaxy_map @harry_wood @dan @randulo LinkedIn is full of ignorant bullshitters jumping on the latest bandwagon.

Fixed it for you.

Harry Wood Mar 17

@galaxy_map @dan @randulo Yeah I'd feel awkward posting anything anti-AI on linkedin, because my bosses would see it, and they have repeatedly instructed us all to be using AI whenever possible! So there's that dynamic at play
Another factor is, mastodon has a lot of early-adopter hipster tech industry folks like the early days of twitter. This crowd has a wisened cynical stance on new tech.
I suspect a lot of us are using AI and trying to form a balanced opinion, more than we are letting on!

@randulo not necessarily. I have many positive results from that. Maybe because we were writing perceptrons since 2000ies...

S-Config Mar 16

@randulo “AI powered” has the same tech bro speak as “powered by the blockchain.” What part of your product or company is AI powered? That you used CoPilot 365 to write the help guide ? Without technical explanation it’s just marketing hype that holds zero weight .

@randulo For me, it's an immediate flag as to what they hell they're on. There has been some products that use that kind of language for... some reason or other, because it's the current hype word so SURELY people would buy our checks notes fancy rice cooker that does nothing other nice rice cookers can do, purely because we're saying it's "AI Powered" and hoping that works magic.

(nothing has changed, it's still the same fuzzy logic doing the timing)

There's the current usual "thing we're saying is AI-powered but we really just ponied up the cash to integrate this other tool into our app, probably poorly, because it doesn't belong here" or "We have to come up with some excuse for why we wanted to fire half of the call center."

There's also the pre-existing cases where stuff is definitely "AI powered" but the definition of "AI" now includes the Illegally Trained Predictive Text Machines and that tool is now lumped together with everything else against its will.

At best it's marketing bullshit or "We never had anything to do with this", at worst it's firing half the call center and saying their new service agents are "AI powered" to cover it up. It's not something any new thing should be bragging about because of how useless a term it is at this point. Those skeptical of genAI in its current form are just going to stay away from it or are going to dig into what is happening under the hood (now news that you fired half your call center and your entire art team is public knowledge). Those who glaze genAI as if it can do nothing wrong ever are going to cling to the product as if it's the next coming of Christ Himself, even if it has literally nothing to do with the current marketing hype train.

@randulo
I think that's a pretty clear result then 😂 No need for a faux ai summary 😁

Steven Heywood Mar 17

@randulo
I can't help thinking that if the techbros had spent the past decade confining the dicking about with pre-alpha components to an in-house sandbox environment rather than deploying them in live production and telling unhappy consumers they are the problem, if they hadn't employed wholesale theft of intellectual property as a development model then told the owners to suck it up, if they hadn't chosen to inject the new toys into every working tool regardless of effect or utility, if they then hadn't sold the business school grads the idea that all this guff could replace humanity, and if the leading proponents of "AI" — a term so debased, so ill-defined and so catch-all to deserve the quotation marks — weren't so weirdly gung-ho about the demise of humanity then perhaps "AI" wouldn't have the bad press it's got.

ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘Mar 17

@randulo Well, that settles that.