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50% of Consumers Prefer Brands That Avoid GenAI Content (nerds.xyz) 31

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: According to the research firm Gartner, 50% of U.S. consumers say they would prefer to do business with brands that avoid using GenAI in consumer facing content such as advertising and promotional messaging. The survey of 1,539 Americans, conducted in October 2025, also found growing skepticism about the reliability of online information, with 61% saying they frequently question whether information they use for everyday decisions is trustworthy... Gartner found that 68% of consumers often wonder whether the content they see online is real, while fewer people now rely on intuition alone to judge credibility [only 27%]. Instead, more consumers are actively verifying information and checking sources.
Gartner's senior principal analyst offered suggests discretion for brands trying to use AI. "The brands that win will be the ones that use AI in ways customers can immediately recognize as helpful, while being transparent about when AI is used, what it's doing, and giving customers a clear choice to opt out."
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50% of Consumers Prefer Brands That Avoid GenAI Content

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  • 50% of surveys are wrong. The other 50% are bogus.

    • Re: 50% (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by jddj ( 1085169 )

      First, WTF is wrong with the other 50%?

      Second: Oh. I see.

      "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

      George Carlin

      • People who quote that quip aren't being half as clever as they think, since it rather depends on the distribution. A normally distributed "intelligence" with a very small standard deviation would not be much of an issue

        • Still true as IQ is characterized on a normal distribution.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          The distribution is known and the quip works. It is not a theoretical observation, but a practical one referencing a specific situation. I do agree that most people do not understand the reasons why the quip works, but it does.

          That said, most people do not understand anything. They fall for the illusion of understanding (e.g. https://davidcycleback.substac... [substack.com]) where they essentially repeat some statements they liked or that are common in their in-groups and then think they have gained understanding. Obvious

          • This makes sense to me. I'm pretty sure that up to 90% of people are those non-rational, shallow thinkers who "get by" by parroting others and following the crowd, not thinking too hard about anything. Meanwhile, the other 10% do all the real thinking and end up producing literature, art, and cultural ideas that take off. Eventually the 90% get wind of it and if they "like" it then it becomes another part of their parrotry. Note that this doesn't necessarily coincide with being rich, successful, or powerful

    • Re:50% (Score:4, Funny)

      by commodore73 ( 967172 ) on Saturday March 21, 2026 @04:55PM (#66053672)
      > 50% of surveys are wrong. The other 50% are bogus.

      And 87% of statistics are made up on the spot.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      And 80% of all people do not understand how surveys work. Guess where you fall in there.

  • ...an AI help system that honestly and accurately answers all of my technical questions, and I mean all.
    I want it to be like talking to the engineer who designed the product, without the boss or PR department filtering the answers

    • by evanh ( 627108 )

      Be prepared to pay $$$ for each answer then. The rush to centralise is a big telltale.

    • Best I can do is generic waffle, point you to our website, and some made up nonsense.
    • Okay well, AI will not solve your desires.

      LLMs can't be trusted to be accurate. They mash words together based on statistics billions of layers deep, producing output that is very authoritative and confident sounding, but they to not have any semantic understanding of what they are calculating. Despite all the guardrails and tuning they still hallucinate or produce inaccurate results, and the time you spend figuring out if the output you got is trustworthy would have been better spent figuring it out yourse

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      ...an AI help system that honestly and accurately answers all of my technical questions, and I mean all.
      I want it to be like talking to the engineer who designed the product, without the boss or PR department filtering the answers

      While you may eventually get that, LLM-type of AI cannot deliver it. Fundamentally impossible, the Math used does not allow it.
      Hence come again after the collapse of the current AI hype, the following, no doubt spectacular, AI winter and then the next hype in 20 year or so. Or several deranged cycles later.

  • They will continue to be annoying whether they are AI or human generated. They only care about getting you to buy their [a lot of times ] shitty product. The only real solution is to either mute them or block them. Most of what is sold via advertising is a solution looking for a problem, and usually requires a high markup in the price in order to pay for the advertising costs. A lot of advertising triggers people to buy the advertised product in a "myopic" buyer-to-advertiser relationship where the buyers t

  • While I am a bit surprised this many people see it, it is exactly on target. What LLM type AI does is make things cheaper and worse and you can only get both together. Obviously, many consumers have reached a limit on how far they are willing to go with that.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday March 21, 2026 @06:05PM (#66053754)

    "Gartner found that 68% of consumers often wonder whether the content they see online is real,"

    54% of US adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
    https://www.thenationalliterac... [thenationa...titute.com]

    60% of America's prison inmates are illiterate and 85% of juvenile offenders are functionally illiterate.

    57% of students who drop out of high school do so because they are unable to read.
    https://www.abtaba.com/blog/us... [abtaba.com]

    The percentage of US adults scoring at or below Level 1 increased from 19% in 2017 to 28% in 2023 — with the pandemic cited as a major reason for the decline.
    https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adu... [nu.edu]

  • by oshkrozz ( 1051896 ) on Saturday March 21, 2026 @09:02PM (#66053964)
    99% of people who fly would like to fly a private plane if it was the same price as economy airfare, so asking this question would have to account for that. (That 1% are people who actually care about things like the environment).
    Yes 50% of people would ... However, would they if it meant the product was 5% less expensive? suddenly that number drops to 10% ...

    If the AI is saving the company money, such that they can reduce the price to consumers, most consumers would take the cheaper product. The same is true with child labor, as long as it is done in China, and people can buy their shoes cheaper, sounds good to them. This is why markets will not be regulated based on consumer choice.
    • > However, would they if it meant the product was 5% less expensive? suddenly that number drops to 10% ...

      Why would it drop to 10%?

      "Hi, would you prefer this product, or the one I took a huge crap on? The one I took a crap on is 5% less expensive."

      or, to use a real world example:

      "Hi, would you prefer this online newspaper written by humans, or this one where human beings write two sentences containing the facts about a recent news event and then ask ChatGPT to expand those two sentences into a 1,000 word

      • Doesn't Amazon do this every day? Buy New, or Used (Like New) condition with a 5% discount... It's a return, may have been crapped on, we don't know.

    • by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      if it meant the product was 5% less expensive

      Well, good news!
      Companies are not going to do that. The goal is to reduce costs (especially salary cost). It isn't to reduce prices.
      My understanding is that video game industry is experiencing pushback from customers because AI is being shoved in without any impact on the prices (or microtransactions).

  • This is a debate that will continue for some time. But AI will win.
    We can only assume that AI will become increasingly powerful, and there will come a point when the question won’t even arise anymore: we will rely solely on AI recommendations.

Per buck you get more computing action with the small computer. -- R.W. Hamming

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