MIT piece on why people hate AI and still use it all day

Mattia

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/05/1145682/people-really-hate-ai-so-why-cant-they-get-enough/

My read is simpler than theirs. People hate the slop not the tool and nobody hates a chat that just tells them where thier order is.

The necklace shop's chat answers about a third of the order questions now. Spent two evenings tuning it: you have to feed it the shipping page word for word or it makes things up.

evan

Mattia wrote
The necklace shop's chat answers about a third of the order questions now.

Answers a third of them, fine, but why would you count that? Either your client sold more or he just gets fewer emails, and only one of those pays for your two evenings plus the monthly bill.

Measure that first. On a shop that size I'd bet it doesn't earn it back.

Rickey

"Answers a third" is the number I'd poke at before the money question. How do you check it, does somebody at the shop read the chat logs, or does it count as answered when the customer stops typing?

On the dog training site I had the same stat for a while and it looked good untill I read the logs myself. A lot of the "answered" ones were almost right. Right lesson, wrong week, that kind of thing and the member just gave up instead of asking again.

It might be different with order questions because the answer is a date and a tracking link not an opinion. Still, who reads them?

Mattia

Somebody reads them, yes: the shop owner's sister goes through the logs on Monday, about 50 chats a week and marks each one right, wrong or "customer left". That's where the third comes from not from the customer going quiet.

But you're right that it was worse than it looked. In September roughly 1 in 10 answers was wrong and almost all of those were shipping times.

It would take the "3 to 5 days" from a product page written in 2023 and say that with a straight face.

Last two weeks 0 wrong out of about 100. Small sample, I know.

Rickey

I read ours too, that's the whole trick - sounds solid on your end; on the LMS I only trust it where one page holds the answer.

MellowThistle0520

Every week a client asks us for an AI chat on their Woo shop, and every week I tell them the same thing, start with your FAQ page and try to read it like a customer first because half of them have shipping prices on there from before the VPS move.

Then we put the chat on top of that and it does fine.

Nobody came back angry so far. Nobody came back richer either. I cant point at one extra order from it, and that would be the only number the client cares about.

vandana

Evan is right on the money question. On the t-shirt client we are running a chat widget for one month last year and nobody touched it, 11 chats in total and 8 of those were the client itself testing.

I went back and removed it. In your case the order questions might be different, but on a small shop the customers are simply writing a WhatsApp only.

wildanchor

"Nobody came back richer" is the wrong measure and "nobody used it" is just a widget in a wrong place. Bottom right corner, grey bubble, nobody clicks that on a phone.

I'm not sure why everybody here only counts the chat. The chat is the small part.

Where the AI pays for itself on my clients is the boring work. The sim racing shop has 300 products and I had to write the product texts for all of them, with the AI it takes me around 15 minutes for a batch of 20 where before it was a whole afternoon. Same with the snippets and the customer emails.

That's hours in a week, every week. I tell the clients that straight and nobody complains!

So if you want to sell them AI, you need to start there, not with a bubble on the corner.

Mattia

I went and pulled the numbers before answering because evan's question bugged me all week. Orders September vs the same weeks last year: flat. Maybe 2 percent up, which is noise on a shop that size.

So no, I can't show you more sales. You were right on that one.

What I can show is the inbox. The "where is my order" emails went from roughly 25 a week to about 8 and the sister who used to answer them now spends that Monday morning reading chat logs instead of writing the same three sentences 25 times. In her case fewer emails is the whole point, that's what she asked me for in the first place, nobody ever said "build me something that sells more necklaces".

Does that pay the monthly bill plus my two evenings? For this client, yes, barely because the hours were hers and she counts them. For a shop where the owner answers emails at midnight for free, it might not and I wouldn't push it.

On the chat vs product texts thin from wildanchor: both, you could say. The order status bit is the easy win becuase it's one call to https://developer.woocommerce.com/docs/ and the answer is a fact. Texts I don't touch on this one, she writes them herself.

Where I land: it earns its keep when somebody was already paid to do the thing it replaces. Otherwise it's a toy.