New research suggests that slapping the “AI” label on products doesn’t always go over well with buyers, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A new study published this month in Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management found that consumers tended to turn away from products that were promoted as having AI — especially if the items were a high-risk purchase like a car.

“When we were thinking about this project, we thought that AI will improve [consumers’ willingness to buy] because everyone is promoting AI in their products,” coauthor Dogan Gursoy, a regents professor of hospitality business management at Washington State University, told the WSJ. “But apparently it has a negative effect, not a positive one.”

Gursoy and his colleagues conducted their research by recruiting two groups of around 100 participants each. One group was shown fictional ads that included terms like “AI-powered,” while the other group saw ads that had more generic terms like “equipped with cutting-edge technologies.” 

The results were counterintuitive, at least if you’ve been watching the tech industry stuff AI into every existing product over the past few years. Why? Because the participants who saw ads with AI-related marketing were less likely to try or buy the products they saw.

But if you think more deeply, that shouldn’t be too surprising. “AI” is more a marketing buzzword than it is an accurate descriptor of some sentient-seeming tech, and companies have shown that they’re more than willing to construe anything with a half-baked algorithm in it as being on the cusp of this wave of bleeding edge technology. (One favorite example: a “smart,” “AI-powered” spice dispenser.)

Meanwhile, even Silicon Valley’s crème de la crème AI chatbots are still highly experimental and prone to screwing up and making up facts. That almost certainly erodes public trust in the tech.

There could be a myriad of other reasons, of course. In the researchers’ view, some customers may be confused about what difference the AI technology actually makes in the products. Or they could be suspicious of the tech’s privacy and safety risks.

“Consumers simply see fewer compelling benefits,” Gursoy told the WSJ, adding that “the specific advantages of AI must be obvious and worthwhile to justify the investment.”

In another study highlighted by the WSJ, researchers at the firm Parks Associates surveyed around 4,000 US consumers’ feelings towards AI marketing, with a slightly more blunt approach: “We straight up asked consumers, ‘If you saw a product that you liked that was advertised as including AI, would that make you more or less likely to buy it?'” Jennifer Kent, vice president of research at Parks Associate, told the paper.

The majority of respondents — 58 percent — said that AI made no difference in their inclination toward buying a product. But 24 percent said AI would make them less likely to, and only 18 percent said they would be more likely to make the purchase. Broken down by age, 24 to 27 percent of the younger crowd (18 to 44 years old) said they were more likely to buy products marketed as having AI, compared with 18 percent overall. And 32 percent of those over 65 years of age and older, by contrast, said they were less likely to buy these products, compared to 24 percent overall.

But the most striking thing? It seems that the AI hype has reached a saturation point.

“Before this wave of generative AI attention over the past couple of years,” Kent told the paper, “AI-enabled features actually have tested very, very well.”

Overexposure is a real thing. Companies across every industry are bombarding the public with exhausting ads that all scream “AI!” At some point, if consumer feelings don’t calcify into cynicism, they may simply stop being impressed.

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