Source: The Atlantic
The Atlantic's framing captures a real market shift: AI adoption has moved past the "revolutionary promise" phase into genuine ambient weirdness, where consumers simultaneously rely on these tools and find them unsettling. This psychological ambivalence—neither excitement nor rejection, but exhausted acceptance—is changing what companies can actually do; the novelty shield that protected early AI products from serious scrutiny is gone, and the reputational cost of creepy implementations is rising. For consumer brands, the competitive advantage has shifted from "we have AI" to "we implemented AI in a way that doesn't feel intrusive."