Internal audiences, especially go-to-market execs at software companies, are demanding that we add visible AI features to our products – primarily because investors see AI-powered companies as more valuable, and competitors are busily making announcements. For the most part, I don’t see this serving our (paying) customers and (human) users very well.
As a product leader, I’m loathe to burden my paying customers with poorly-conceived or poorly-working features to placate stakeholders. (We should always start with how our work will make end users happier, more productive, or safer. Then choose the right tech.)
Case in point: I’m a long-time Kindle reader, and Amazon is now irritating me with a badly conceived experiment powered by transparently fake AI-generated images of books. They must not consider my time or attention or goodwill very valuable.
I misplaced my previous Kindle Paperwhite… not a big deal, since the devices are inexpensive and my content lives in Amazon’s cloud. So I ordered a replacement, which promptly arrived… with a new (but unrequested, unwelcome, unfriendly) feature: displaying book ads in its OFF state. I’m guessing that Amazon’s ad sales team hasn’t yet gotten many publishers/authors to pay for real ads, though, since most appear to be badly AI-generated images of apparently fake books.
You’ll note in these images that
- Titles in the captions don’t match titles on the book covers
- Cover copy and author names and subtitles are missing, misspelled, or gibberish
- The artwork is amateur
And if I take the bait – click through to the purported book information to see what happens – I get assorted error messages. Not something that inspires confidence.
[Yes, a careful shopper would figure out that I can pay Amazon extra to banish ads from the device. An unwanted new feature to generate incremental revenue and p**s off readers. They position this as “Amazon's Special Offers gives a discount on your device by displaying special offers and ads. Since you agreed to Special Offers during device purchase and setup, you received a $20 discount.”
It’s not enough that they hold an effective monopoly on e-books, and hold publishers hostage to their most-favored-nation pricing scheme. Or that I don’t actually own the content that I’ve bought, since Amazon can remove/lose content or change its terms & conditions at will. Or that Kindle books already earn nearly 100% margin, since copies of e-books can be delivered at effectively zero cost. They need to extract another $20 from me.]
I assume that Amazon is trying to gauge user interest in random titles (which they could then subcontract out to humans or AI-generate based on thousands of similar human-authored titles)… and/or attempting to generate baseline click-through statistics to pressure publishers to pay for on-Kindle ads in addition to promotional fees in the online Kindle store.
But these book covers are laughably bad. So in addition to mistrusting their motives and being forced into this benchmarking experiment, I’m questioning their mastery of AI image generation tools.
Perhaps I’m the rube here, getting worked up about yet another extractive consumer monetization scheme “where the ads take aim and lay their claim to the heart and the soul of the spender.”
Sound Byte
Amid the AI urgency and hype cycle, we (product folks) need to keep our end users in mind. What (AI or other) capabilities and features add value to their experience? Deliver more value to them? Make their jobs easier? If our main objective is to pacify internal audiences, we’re missing the chance to identify real problems for real users… then match appropriate tech to those problems.