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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

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451 points imartin2k | 3 comments | 06 Jul 25 06:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.648s | source
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Workaccount2 ◴[06 Jul 25 14:58 UTC] No.44481307[source]▶
As far as I can tell, the AI-hate is most prominent in tech circles (creativity too, but they don't like media generation, largely embrace text though).

It seems here on the ground in non-tech bubble land, people use ChatGPT a ton and lean hard on AI features.

When Google judges the success of bolted on AI, they are looking at how Jane and John General Public use it, not how xleet007 uses it(or doesn't).

There is also the fact that AI is still just being bolted onto things now. The next iteration of this software will be AI native, and the revisions after that will iron out big wrinkles.

When settings menus and ribbon panels are optional because you can just tell the program what to do in plain English, that will be AI integration.

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1. dingnuts ◴[06 Jul 25 15:17 UTC] No.44481456[source]▶
Ok but TFA says only 8% of REGULAR PEOPLE want these features so if you're going to directly contradict the source material we all just read (right???) you should bring a citation because otherwise, in light of the data in the article you are ostensibly discussing, I don't know how that's "as far as you can tell."
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2. mike_hearn ◴[06 Jul 25 15:47 UTC] No.44481739[source]▶
It doesn't say that. The actual question asked was whether people would pay extra for AI features, which isn't the same thing as asking if they want them.

If you look at the survey results, a few things jump out.

Firstly, there's a strong age skew. The people most likely to benefit from AI features in their software are those who are judged directly on their computing productivity, i.e. the young. Around half of 18-35 year olds say they would pay extra, even . It's only amongst the old that this drops to 20%.

Secondly, when asked directly if they value a range of AI-driven features, they say yes.

The skew opens up because companies like OpenAI give AI services away for free. There's just a really strong expectation established by the tech industry that software is either free or paid for by a low and very price-stable monthly subscription. This is also true in AI: you only pay for ChatGPT if you want more features and smarter models. For the majority of things that people are doing with AI right now, the free version of ChatGPT is good enough. What remains is mostly low value stuff like better autocomplete, where indeed people are probably not that interested in paying more for it.

Unfortunately Ted Gioia tries to use this stat to imply people don't want AI at all, which is not only untrue but trivially untrue; ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in history.

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3. SoftTalker ◴[06 Jul 25 16:46 UTC] No.44482202[source]▶
I pay for a subscription to a local news blog (because our local newspaper no longer covers local news). I would not pay for the same content delivered by AI. Does the blogger use AI to write his stories? I trust him when he says he does not but I guess I have no way to know for sure.

I will pay people for the value they create. I won't pay for AI content, or AI integrations. They are not interesting or valuable to me.