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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

#251

Post by jfengel »

Just moments ago I noticed for the first time that Gmail was giving me a summary of email I had received.

Please don't. I am going to read this email. Adding more text just makes me read more.

I am sure there's a common use case of people who get a ton of faintly important email from colleagues. But this is my personal account and the only people contacting me are friends. (Everyone else should not be summarized; they should be trashed. And to be fair I am very grateful for Gmail's excellent spam filtering.)

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

#252

Post by tim333 »

It's annoying having AI features force fed I imagine but it's come about due to many of the public liking some AI - apparently ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly users (https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2025/05/chatgpt-stat...) and then competing companies think they should try to keep up.

I say I imagine it's annoying because I've yet to actually be annoyed much but I get the idea. I actually quite like the Google AI bit - you can always not read it if you don't want to. AI generated content on youtube is a bit of a mixed bag - it tends to be kinda bad but you can click stop and play another video. My office 2019 is gloriously out of date and does that stuff I want without the recent nonsense.

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

#253

Post by mouse_ »

spacemadness wrote: post #241

Having seen the almost rabid and fearful reactions of product owners first hand around forcing AI into every product, it’s because all these companies are in panic mode. Many of these folks are not thinking clearly and have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t think they have time to think it through. Doing something is better than nothing. It’s all theatre for their investors coupled with a fear of being seen as f…

eventually, people (investors) notice when their money is scared...

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

#254

Post by shdon »

jfengel wrote: post #251

Just moments ago I noticed for the first time that Gmail was giving me a summary of email I had received. Please don't. I am going to read this email. Adding more text just makes me read more. I am sure there's a common use case of people who get a ton of faintly important email from colleagues. But this is my personal account and the only people contacting me are friends. (Everyone else should not be summarized; the…

How long before spam filtering is also done by an LLM and spammers or black hat hackers embed instructions into their spam mails to exploit flaws in the AI?

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

#255

Post by llm_nerd »

As a note on Microsoft's obnoxious Copilot push, I too got the "Your 365 subscription price is increasing because we're forcing AI on you".

Only when I went to cancel[1], suddenly they made me aware that there was a "classic" subscription that was the normal price, without CoPilot. So they basically just upsized everyone to try to force uptake.

[1] - I'm in the AI business and am a user and abuser of AI daily, but I don't need it built directly into every app. I Already have AI subscriptions and local models and solutions.

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

#256

Post by AppleBananaPie »

spacemadness wrote: post #241

Having seen the almost rabid and fearful reactions of product owners first hand around forcing AI into every product, it’s because all these companies are in panic mode. Many of these folks are not thinking clearly and have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t think they have time to think it through. Doing something is better than nothing. It’s all theatre for their investors coupled with a fear of being seen as f…

Yeah the internal 'experts' pushing ai having no idea what they're doing but acting like they do is like a weird fever dream lol

Everyone nodding along, yup yup this all makes sense

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

#257

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

blindriver wrote: post #187

Even worse: they are using your data that you are inputting into these programs to continuously train their data. That’s an even bigger violation since it breaches data privacy.

I wish there was a checkbox that controlled this. 5% of the time I need the privacy, 95% of the time I'm tired of correcting the AI in the same way that I corrected it yesterday and I would happily take a little extra time out of my day to teach them to stop repeatedly making the same mistakes.

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

#258

Post by waswaswas »

tim333 wrote: post #252

It's annoying having AI features force fed I imagine but it's come about due to many of the public liking some AI - apparently ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly users ( https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2025/05/chatgpt-stat... ) and then competing companies think they should try to keep up. I say I imagine it's annoying because I've yet to actually be annoyed much but I get the idea. I actually quite like the…

I hate the Google AI Overview. More of my knowledge-seeking searches than not are things that have a consequential, singular correct answer. It's hard to break the habit of reading the search AI response first, it feeling not quite right, remembering that I can't actually trust it, then skipping down to pull up a page with the actual answer. Involuntary injection of needless confusion and mental effort with every query. If I wanted a vibe-answer, I'd ask ChatGPT with my plus subscription instead of Google, because at least then I get a proper model instead of whatever junk is cheap enough for Google to auto-run on every query without a subscription.

And of course there's no way to disable it without also losing calculator, unit conversions, and other useful functionality.

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

#259

Post by recursive »

spacemadness wrote: post #241

Having seen the almost rabid and fearful reactions of product owners first hand around forcing AI into every product, it’s because all these companies are in panic mode. Many of these folks are not thinking clearly and have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t think they have time to think it through. Doing something is better than nothing. It’s all theatre for their investors coupled with a fear of being seen as f…

The product I'm working on is privately owned. Hence no investors. We're still in the process of cramming AI into everything.

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

#260

Post by ruszki »

satyrun wrote: post #85
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?

My 75 year old father uses Claude instead of google now for basically any search function. All the anti-AI people I know are in their 30s. I think there are many in this age group that got use to nothing changing and are wishing it to stay that way.

Nothing changing? For people who are in their 30s? Do you mean internet, mobile phones, smart phones, Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Reddit were already widespread in mid 90s?

Or are they the only ones who understand that the rate of real information/(spam+disinformation+misinformation+lies) is worse than ever? And that in the past 2 years, this was thanks to AI, and people who never check what garbage AI spew out? And only they are who cares to not consume the shit? Because clearly above 50, most of them were completely fine with it for decades now. Do you say that below 30 most of the people are fine to consume garbage? I mean, seeing how many young people started to deny Holocaust, I can imagine it, but I would like some hard data, and not just some AI level guesswork.

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