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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

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Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#111

Post by ikr678 »

brookst wrote: post #102
cs702 wrote: post #95

Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Ama…

It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…

For consumer pproducts, sure, don't buy them. For people in office based careers, they may not get a choice when their company rolls out copilot, or management decide to buy an ai helpdesk agent, or a vendor pushes ai slop into the next enterprise software version.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#112

Post by mafuy »

oceanplexian wrote: post #91
einrealist wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't "Engineering" is based on predictability, on repeatability? LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output. Each change to the model impacts how it parses and computes the input. For someone claiming to be a "Prompt Engineer", this cannot work. There are so many variables that are simply unknown to the casual user: training methods, the training set, biases, ... If I get the feeling I am…

> LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output. If you run an open source model from the same seed on the same hardware they are completely deterministic. It will spit out the same answer every time. So it’s not an issue with the technology and there’s nothing stopping you from writing repeatable prompts and promoting techniques.

Who's saying that the model stays the same and the seed is not random for most of the companies that run AI? There is no drawback to randomness for them.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#113

Post by nonplus »

daishi55 wrote: post #62

ChatGPT is the 5th most-visited website on the planet and growing quickly. that’s one of many popular products. Hardly call that unwilling. I bet only something like 8% of Instagram users say they would pay for it. Are we to take this to mean that Instagram is an unpopular product that is rbi g forced on an unwilling public?

I do think Facebook and Instagram are forced on the public if they want to fully interact with their peers.

I just don't participate in discussions about Facebook marketplace links friends share, or Instagram reels my D&D groups post.

So in a sense I agree with you, forcing AI into products is similar to forcing advertising into products.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#114

Post by brookst »

ikr678 wrote: post #111
brookst wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…

For consumer pproducts, sure, don't buy them. For people in office based careers, they may not get a choice when their company rolls out copilot, or management decide to buy an ai helpdesk agent, or a vendor pushes ai slop into the next enterprise software version.

How is that different from not liking other technology choices one’s employer makes? I could write a book about how much I hate our expense tool. But it’s never occurred to me that I am entitled to have a different one.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#115

Post by dang »

I also find these features annoying and useless and wish they would go away. But that's not because LLMs are useless, nor because the public isn't using them (as daishi55 pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44479578)

It's because the integrations with existing products are arbitrary and poorly thought through, the same way that software imposed by executive fiat in BigCo offices for trend-chasing reasons has always been.

petekoomen made this point recently in a creative way: AI Horseless Carriages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773813 - April 2025 (478 comments)

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#116

Post by bacchusracine »

sagacity wrote: post #75
mrob wrote: post #25

>Everybody wanted the Internet. I don't think this is true. A lot of people had no interest until smartphones arrived. Doing anything on a smartphone is a miserable experience compared to using a desktop computer, but it's more convenient. "Worse but more convenient" is the same sales pitch as for AI, so I can only assume that AI will be accepted by the masses too.

People didn't even want mobile phones. In The Netherlands, there's a famous video of an interviewer asking people on the street ca. 1997 whether they would want a mobile phone. So not even a smartphone, just a mobile phone. The answer was overwhelmingly negative.

>there's a famous video of an interviewer asking people on the street ca. 1997 whether they would want a mobile phone. So not even a smartphone, just a mobile phone. The answer was overwhelmingly negative.

So people didn't want to be walking around with a tether that allowed the whole world to call them where ever they were? Le Shock!

Now if they'd asked people if they'd like a small portable computer they could keep in touch with friends and read books, play games, play music and movies on where ever they went which also made phone calls. I suspect the answer might have been different.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#117

Post by mafuy »

brookst wrote: post #102
cs702 wrote: post #95

Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Ama…

It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…

AI shit is usually not advertising as such. It's made to look like it was made a human. So I would have to consider this product carefully beforehand, or to return it after buying. That's a hassle. I don't want to spend productive time on this nonsense. For all I care, say it hurts the GDP.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#118

Post by enragedcacti »

oceanplexian wrote: post #91
einrealist wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't "Engineering" is based on predictability, on repeatability? LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output. Each change to the model impacts how it parses and computes the input. For someone claiming to be a "Prompt Engineer", this cannot work. There are so many variables that are simply unknown to the casual user: training methods, the training set, biases, ... If I get the feeling I am…

> LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output. If you run an open source model from the same seed on the same hardware they are completely deterministic. It will spit out the same answer every time. So it’s not an issue with the technology and there’s nothing stopping you from writing repeatable prompts and promoting techniques.

Predictable does not necessarily follow from deterministic. Hash algorithms, for instance, are valuable specifically because they are both deterministic and unpredictable.

Relying on model, seed, and hardware to get "repeatable" prompts essentially reduces an LLM to a very lossy natural language decompression algorithm. What other reason would someone have for asking the same question over and over and over again with the same input? If that's a problem you need solve then you need a database, not a deterministic LLM.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#119

Post by danaris »

mrob wrote: post #25

>Everybody wanted the Internet. I don't think this is true. A lot of people had no interest until smartphones arrived. Doing anything on a smartphone is a miserable experience compared to using a desktop computer, but it's more convenient. "Worse but more convenient" is the same sales pitch as for AI, so I can only assume that AI will be accepted by the masses too.

I've seen this bad take over and over again in the last few years, as a response to the public reaction to cryptocurrency, NFTs, and now generative AI.

It's bullshit.

I mean, sure: there were people who hated the Internet. There still are! They were very clearly a minority, and almost exclusively older people who didn't like change. Most of them were also unhappy about personal computers in general.

But the Internet caught on very fast, and was very, very popular. It was completely obvious how positive it was, and people were making businesses based on it left and right that didn't rely on grifting, artificial scarcity, or convincing people that replacing their own critical thinking skills with a glorified autocomplete engine was the solution to all their problems. (Yes, there were also plenty of scams and unsuccessful businesses. They did not in any way outweigh the legitimate successes.)

By contrast, generative AI, while it has a contingent of supporters that range from reasonable to rabid, is broadly disliked by the public. And a huge reason for that is how much it is being pushed on them against their will, replacing human interaction with companies and attempting to replace other things like search.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#120

Post by [deleted] »

mrob wrote: post #25

>Everybody wanted the Internet. I don't think this is true. A lot of people had no interest until smartphones arrived. Doing anything on a smartphone is a miserable experience compared to using a desktop computer, but it's more convenient. "Worse but more convenient" is the same sales pitch as for AI, so I can only assume that AI will be accepted by the masses too.

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