You don't think users, paid users at that, shouldn't have a say in product development? Good lord no wonder the public distrusts the tech community so much.

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Grombobulous 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, I think the more broad issue here is that NYT should know better that public sentiment on AI is incredibly negative.

I do find this somewhat paradoxical to the fact that clearly a lot of people use it.

It seems like one of those things where culturally it’s become virtuous to be against it and to say you don’t use it, but privately most people are using it.

Still, I think NYT’s subscriber demographic is likely pretty educated and specifically paying for higher quality content. They don’t want haphazardly tossed together recipe blogs.

AI sentiment is negative enough that all companies who build in AI features need to include a toggle that hides them completely. Otherwise you get user backlash like this.

	▲	eichin 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So negative that the first I heard about this was with the title "New York Times adds glue to its Cooking App. Users aren't thrilled" (presumably from someone who read the niemanlab article before I did)

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mmonaghan 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think there are prob more paid users who want the feature and are willing to pay than those who don't want it, which is why the team built it. They might even believe it brings in new users. It's polarizing but all ai features are lately.

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thisismyanon2 4 hours ago | parent [-]

TFA says that over 70% of the comments were negative with the remainder being split between positive and neutral. I'm sure the Times thinks it will rope in new users, but I'm sure the Times is factually wrong.

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jibalt 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Comments aren't users. Commenters are statistically biased toward complaints.

	▲	thisismyanon2 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If they're not users what are they? Are you trying to claim that the NYT site is getting brigaded by anti-AI advocates? There are plenty of AI-negative reviews on Apple's app store. Is the App Store publishing bogus complaints too? I think Occam's Razor applies here. Much like Copilot or Dell's AI computers, nobody wants slop from the NYT. People pay for NYT Cooking specifically for the human curation. Getting slop with a big "we didn't test this recipe and aren't responsible for it" is a net negative in this context.

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jibalt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's quite a strawman.