AI feels like “quick and cheap at the cost of quality” so I completely get why consumers would dislike it while business people love it.

The biggest one that jumps out at me is Amazon replacing their review search box with "Rufus", which searching the entire context of an item on Amazon, including descriptions, reviews, everything. It then wants me to ask it a question instead of doing a boring search for keywords.

If I'm looking at a product and want to search the reviews for the keyword "battery life" and see what real, actual people are experiencing, I can't do that anymore. A search for "battery life" in Rufus always returns some nonsense like "Many customers report good battery life, while others say it's runtime is shorter than expected". I want human experience! I want specifics! Why is everything sanded down to "good or bad"?

The companies that use AI the best will be those for which you don't have to tell someone they're using AI. That will be the sign of it being a quality product.

If you have to scream, shout, and beg your consumers to use your AI product, you're simply doing it wrong.

Hand-crafted has always been the gold-standard of high-status. AI content is inherently low-status.

To the extent that AI adds value, it is being captured, rather than going back to the consumer.

I think this is the real issue. Consumers love shiny cool stuff, but they don't like Clippy the paperclip. They like Siri when it helps but they don't like Siri when it impedes them.

What a conundrum! Why oh why are consumers reacting this way?

It's the definition of cutting corners. Using statistical inference to guess at what's right as fast as possible.

+1 I think you've hit the nail on the head here.