New Study: People Dislike AI-Labeled Products
Would you prefer if this blog were "AI-powered"?
Hello friends—it’s Alberto.
I’ve realized a bit too late (three years in!) that I never properly introduce myself, and a friend at Substack told me that I should. I’m a writer who once tried to be an engineer. I care about AI and technology, but also about culture, philosophy, and the complicated business of being human. This newsletter is where I try to bring those worlds together. If I had to say what I’m best at, I’d say: stubborn common sense. Come in!
Today’s post is about a new study that reveals people don’t like it when vendors put AI labels on their products.
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Researchers from Washington State University and Temple University have published a new study on the effects of adding AI features to products.
They made two groups of 100 participants and measured, using fictional ads, whether people would be more or less willing to buy a product that had an “AI” label or was “AI-powered”, compared to a product that was labeled “cutting-edge tech,” or “new technology” instead (control group).
To those of you who read this blog often, the findings, reported initially by the Wall Street Journal, won't come as a surprise:
. . . members of the group that saw the AI-related wording were less likely to say they would want to try, buy or actively seek out any of the products or services being advertised compared with people in the other group.
This was the case for all products but especially for high-risk products, “such as a car or a medical-diagnostic service.” I find it interesting that the authors of the study thought the AI label would make people more likely to buy the products, not less.
This result is in line with a growing trend of suspicion and mistrust toward generative AI.
Not everyone has read Apple's paper “The illusion of thinking” or MIT’s paper “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” but anyone who's used an AI tool more than once knows how unreliable they are. When it nails the task, it's better than any human, but when it fails, it does so in this weirdly inhuman way. The failures would be otherwise amusing; instead, they become scary.
But even if you don't actively use ChatGPT—apparently, only 34% of US adults have ever tried it, a number that feels quite low—you've surely seen the AI label a lot lately. Every single app now has an AI feature. Sometimes it's genuinely useful. Other times, it's annoyingly unnecessary. But at times, it makes the product actually worse.