[HN Gopher] Don't push AI down our throats
___________________________________________________________________
Don't push AI down our throats
Author : nutanc
Score : 279 points
Date : 2025-11-30 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gpt3experiments.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gpt3experiments.substack.com)
| DaveZale wrote:
| try watching a televised American football game. So many ads for
| AI. Of course ads appeal most to the gullible.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Have you seen the Workday ads featuring all the washed-up rock
| stars? They're pushing managing people _AND_ AI agents - using
| AI. sigh...
| Isamu wrote:
| The AI push is not just hype, it's a scramble for cash. For now
| the only game plan is to scale up massively with a giant
| investment gamble, to try to get beyond the obvious limitations
| that threaten to burst the bubble.
|
| Plus the general economy outlook is negative, AI is the bright
| spot. They are striving to keep growth up amid downward pressure.
| newsclues wrote:
| If AI was amazing you wouldn't need to push it, people would
| demand it!
|
| You need to push slop, because people don't really want it.
| daft_pink wrote:
| The real creepy thing is the way they force you to give up your
| data with these products. If it were just useful add ons, it
| wouldn't bother me, but the fact that Gemini requires you to turn
| activity history off for paid plans for the promise they won't
| train on your data or allow a person to view your prompts is
| insanity. If you're paying $20 for Pro or 249.99 for Ultra, you
| should be able to get activity history without training or review
| or storing your data for several years.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| I have a pixel watch, and my main use for it is setting
| reminders, like "reminder 3pm put the laundry in the dryer".
| It's worked fine since the day I bought it.
|
| Last week, they pushed an update that broke all of the features
| on the watch unless I agreed to allow Google to train their AI
| on my content.
| Teever wrote:
| International coordinated action by consumers taking a
| company to small claims court at the same time around the
| world to see redress about defective products would be an
| effective strategy.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Are you proposing a "World Sue A Tech Giant Day"? A global
| bonanza of micro-litigation that bleeds AI-leviathans dry
| by a thousand cuts?
|
| I'm in, but let's have it in October or something when I'm
| less busy.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I like this idea, though I'm concerned about how we could
| make sure the courts are ready to handle the deluge of
| activity.
|
| Update: talked to some experts. IANAL, and they aren't
| either. This would be cataclysmic for the courts unless
| they knew it was coming AND every claim was filed
| correctly (fees paid, no errors, etc). Even if everything
| was done perfectly, it would be a ton of work and there's
| no way every case would be processed in a day. It's also
| likely that all the identical cases filed in a single
| jurisdiction would be heard together in a single trial.
| There's also weirdness when you consider where each claim
| is filed. Quote: "you may be in the right, but I can
| guarantee you would have a terrible time"
| cj wrote:
| [delayed]
| verisimi wrote:
| > I have a pixel watch
|
| you rented/leased a watch for an undefined amount of time.
| state_less wrote:
| My Android phone comes hobbled unless I give it all my data
| to be used for training data (or whatever). I just asked, "Ok
| Google, play youtube music." And it responded with, "I cannot
| play music, including YouTube Music, as that tool is
| currently disabled based on your preferences. I can help you
| search for information about artists or songs on YouTube,
| though. By the way, to unlock the full functionality of all
| Apps, enable Gemini Apps Activity."
|
| I'm new to Android, so maybe I can somehow still preserve
| some privacy and have basic voice commands, but from what I
| saw, it required me to enable Gemini Apps Activity with a
| wall of text I had to agree to in order to get a simple
| command to play some music to work.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Just stop talking to your computer and use the screen
| interface, that still works.
| DerCed wrote:
| How long, though, until every input is AI-interpreted and
| your intention is "helpfully" translated to "what you
| meant"
| state_less wrote:
| When I'm on my bike, it's difficult. I will ride no
| handed and change a track, but it's more dangerous than
| it needs to be.
|
| I might switch back to my iOS device, but what I'd really
| like to do is replace the Andriod OS on this Motorola
| with a community oriented open source OS. Then I could
| start working on piping the mic audio to my own STT model
| and execute commands on the phone.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| That is the point when I turn around and walk away from
| that company.
| state_less wrote:
| I'm almost there, but the mobile operating systems
| (compatible with the phones i have) are a snag at the
| moment.
| quantified wrote:
| Did you agree, or did you give up your data?
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| We need consumer protection laws that protect against
| functional regressions like this -- if a widget could do X
| when I bought it, it should keep doing X for the life of the
| product and I shouldn't have to "agree" to an updated license
| for it to be able to keep doing X.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Or even updates that introduce new, undesired
| functionality. When I bought my PS4 (at launch), the
| section of the UI for video apps was pleasant and
| straightforward. It had the various video apps I had
| installed and that was it. Fast forward several years, and
| Sony updated the UI to prioritize showing apps that they
| wanted you to use (whether you had installed them or not),
| and even showed ads for movies and such.
|
| I don't think it's asking too much to _not make my product
| worse_ after I buy it, and I think we need legislation to
| prevent companies from doing that. I 'm not sure what that
| would look like, and the government is bought and paid for
| by those same companies, so it's unlikely we will see that.
| But we do need it.
| polotics wrote:
| https://gitlab.com/natural_aliens/geminichatsaver/-/tree/mai...
| pull requests and any other feedback welcome
| jacquesm wrote:
| And the fact that even if you don't want it, don't use it they
| _still_ charge you as if you do.
| nacozarina wrote:
| assume it is being 'done wrong', not due to the usual trifecta of
| greed/evil/stupidity, but due to socio-economic pressure that
| demands this approach.
|
| AI really needs R&D time, where we first figure out what it's
| good for and how best to exploit it.
|
| But R&D for SW is dead. Users proved to be super-resilient to
| buggy or mis-matched sw. They adapt. 'Good-enough' often doesn't
| look it. Private equity sez throw EVERYTHING at the wall and
| chase what sticks...
| zzzeek wrote:
| > We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead
| of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.
|
| i support this but the Smarter Than Me types say it's impossible.
| It's not possible to track down an adequate number of copyright
| holders, much less get their permission, much less afford to pay
| them, for the number of works required in order to get the LLM to
| achieve "liftoff".
|
| I would think that as I use Claude for coding, it would work just
| as well if it didnt suck down the last three years of NYT
| articles as if it did. There's a vast amount of content that is
| in the public domain, and if you're ChatGPT you can make deals
| with a bunch of big publishers to get more modern content too.
| But that's my know-nothing take.
|
| maybe the issue is more about the image content. Screw the image
| content (and _definitely_ the music content, spotify pushing this
| slop is immensely offensive), pay the artists. My code OTOH is
| open source, MIT licensed. It 's not art at all. Go get it
| (though throw me a few thousand bucks every year because you want
| to do the right thing).
| FLT8 wrote:
| It's not' impossible', it's economically unviable. There's a
| difference. We really should be mandating that companies that
| don't pay fair market prices for the data they use to train
| their models must open source _everything_ as reparation to
| humanity.
| bgwalter wrote:
| It is not an axiom that LLMs even have the right to achieve
| "liftoff". They are obvious instruments of plagiarism that
| often just reorder sentences so as not to get caught. They can
| be forbidden.
|
| If you don't mind the oligarchs stealing your code, that is
| your prerogative. Many other people do mind.
| shmerl wrote:
| As usual, those who spent too much money on it use it as a way to
| show their investors they didn't waste all that money and to get
| them to spend even more. That's why it's so messed up.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| > I will not allow AI to be pushed down my throat just to justify
| your bad investment.
|
| Pretty much my sentiment too.
| exsomet wrote:
| The neat thing about all this is that you don't get a choice!
|
| Your favorite services are adding "AI" features (and raising
| prices to boot), your data is being collected and analyzed
| (probably incorrectly) by AI tools, you are interacting with
| AI-generated responses on social media, viewing AI-generated
| images and videos, and reading articles generated by AI.
| Business leaders are making decisions about your job and your
| value using AI, and political leaders are making policy and
| military decisions based on AI output.
|
| It's happening, with you or to you.
| hansvm wrote:
| Reasonably far off topic:
|
| Visa hasn't worked for online purchases for me for a few
| months, seemingly because of a rogue fraud-detection AI their
| customer service can't override.
|
| Is there any chance that's just a poorly implemented
| traditional solution rather than feeding all my data into an
| LLM?
| fragmede wrote:
| If by "traditional solution" you mean a bunch of data is
| fed into creating an ML model and then your individual
| transaction is fed into that, and it spits out a fraud
| score, then no, they'd not using LLMs, but at this high a
| level, what's the difference? If their ML model uses a
| transformers-based architecture vs not, what difference
| does it make?
| esseph wrote:
| One hallucinates data, one does not?
| hansvm wrote:
| > what difference does it make
|
| Traditional fraud-detection models have quantified
| type-i/ii error rates, and somebody typically chooses
| parameters such that those errors are within acceptable
| bounds. If somebody decided to use a transformers-based
| architecture in roughly the same setup as before then
| there would be no issue, but if somebody listened to some
| exec's hairbrained idea to "let the AI look for fraud"
| and just came up with a prompt/api wrapping a modern LLM
| then there would be huge issues.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I run a small online software business and I am continually
| getting cards refused for blue chip customers (big
| companies, universities etc). My payment processor
| (2Checkout/Verifone) say it is 3DS authentication failures
| and not their fault. The customers tell me that their banks
| say it isn't the bank's fault. The problem is particularly
| acute for UK customers. It is costing me sales. It has
| happened before as well:
|
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2022/04/14/verifone-seems-
| to-...
| wasmainiac wrote:
| I do have a choice, I just stop using the product. When
| messenger added AI assistants, I switched to WhatsApp. Now
| WhatsApp has one too, now I'm using Signal. Wife brought home
| a win11 laptop, didn't like the cheeky AI integration, now it
| runs Linux.
| wishfish wrote:
| Installed Windows a few months ago on a new PC. They put an
| AI chat box in the installer while Microsoft was
| downloading updates in the background. Seemed utterly
| ridiculous. Squeezing it in wherever they could.
|
| At least it had a sense of humor. I told Copilot this
| install was taking too long and I was bored. It responded
| with essentially: "if you've got time to lean, you've got
| time to clean. You might as well sweep up the kitchen
| during this install."
| codaphiliac wrote:
| almost the same as RTO mandates:
|
| we'll force you to come back to justify sunk money in office
| space.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Don't forget about the poor local businesses. Someone needs
| to pay to keep the executives' lunch spots open.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| I personally think all the gains in productivity that
| happened with WFH were just because people were stressed and
| WFH acted like a pressure relief. But too much of a good
| thing and people get lazy (seeing it right now, some people
| are filling full timesheets and not even starting let alone
| getting through a day of work in a week), so the right
| balance is somewhere in the middle.
|
| Perhaps... the right balance is actually working only 4 days
| a week, always from the office, and just having the 5th day
| proper-off instead.
|
| I think people go through "grinds" to get big projects done,
| and then plateau's of "cooling down". I think every person
| only has so much grind to give, and extra days doesn't mean
| more work, so the ideal employee is one you pay for 3-4 days
| per week only.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Replace AI with Blockchain. With cloud. With big data. With ERP.
| With service models. With basically almost any fad since
| virtualization. It's the same thing: over-hyped tools with
| questionable value being shoe-horned into every possible orifice
| so the investors can make money.
|
| I'm not opposed to any of the above, necessarily. I've just
| always been the type to want to adopt things as they are needed
| and bring demonstrable value to myself or my employer and not a
| moment before. _That_ is the problem that capital has tried to
| solve through "founder mode" startups and exploitative business
| models: "It doesn't matter whether you need it or not, what
| matters is that we're forcing you to pay for it so we get our
| returns."
| manphone wrote:
| The difference is the level of investment and consumer
| application for each service - most customers would never be
| able to tell you what an erp is.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Replace AI with Blockchain. With cloud. With big data. With
| ERP. With service models. With basically almost any fad since
| virtualization. It's the same thing: over-hyped tools with
| questionable value being shoe-horned into every possible
| orifice so the investors can make money.
|
| They said the exact same thing when electricity was invented
| too.
|
| Gas companies said electricity was a fad. Some doctors said
| electric light harms the eyes. It's too expensive for practical
| use. Need too much infrastructure investment. AC will kill
| people with shocks. Electrification will destroy jobs, said gas
| lamp unions. It's unnatural, said some clergy. And on and on
| and on...
| exasperaited wrote:
| This post is just one multipurpose category error.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Electric light indeed harms the eyes.
| XorNot wrote:
| What an utterly bizarre comparison.
|
| Even the block chain comparison isn't valid because it didn't
| consist of an "AI" button getting crammed into every single
| product and website, turned into a popover etc.
| aurareturn wrote:
| There are nuances to the examples.
|
| For example, I'm not a big fan of blockchain. In fact, I
| think crypto is just 99% scam.
|
| But big data led to machine learning and LLMS right? Cloud
| led to cheaper software with faster deploy times right? In
| fact, cloud also means many browser based apps replacing
| old Windows apps.
|
| None of these were fads. They are still tremendously useful
| today.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Thing is though, most folks don't recall that electricity
| itself wasn't the fad, but some methods of generation were.
| Same with vehicles, as everyone tried every fuel until we
| gradually found the ones that worked best in each engine or
| vehicle.
|
| As I'm seeing from the multitude of folks scrutinizing my
| _clearly exhaustive_ list of every single technology fad
| _ever_ (sarcasm, for those unclear), they 're missing the
| forest for the trees and therefore likely to hit every single
| rung when they fall down a ladder. I'm not saying X or Y
| wasn't _valuable_ , or wasn't _useful_ , only that they way
| they're shoved into every single orifice by force is _neither
| of those things_ to those taken advantage of in the quest for
| utility.
|
| The point isn't that advancements are bad, the point is the
| way we force them down the throats of everyone, everywhere,
| all the time creates a waste of skill and capital for the
| returns of a very select group of people. The point is that
| _fads are bad_ , and we should let entities (companies _and_
| people) find use in what 's offered naturally rather than
| force-feeding garbage to everyone to see what's actually
| palatable.
| tayo42 wrote:
| How could say cloud is overhyped when we're at a point where
| running physical machines is a rare and specialized skill and
| companies couldn't run their own hardware anymore.
| gosub100 wrote:
| If AI was as great as they pretend, there would be no need to
| force it on us.
| AGI-slop wrote:
| Its the only game in town, and reasonably expected to be close
| to the last.
| InexSquirrel wrote:
| What do you mean by that?
| AGI-slop wrote:
| A few days ago i took a photo of some water pipes, and
| asked chatgpt to review it .
|
| Unbeknownst to me that there was an issue. It pointed out
| multiple signs of slow leaks and then described what i
| should do to test and repair it easily.
|
| I see a lot of negative energy about the 'AI' tech we have
| today to the point where you will get mass downvoted for
| saying something positive.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| It's the classic "You don't need to tell a child that something
| is fun. The more times you a child something is fun, the more
| they will doubt you. It's easy to tell if something is fun,
| because it's fun."
| arealaccount wrote:
| > We don't need to do it this quarter just because some startup
| has to do an earnings call.
|
| What startups are doing earning calls?
| collingreen wrote:
| All the public ones?
| TZubiri wrote:
| I'd say at that point they are no longer startups, they've
| already started up
| crabmusket wrote:
| Lots of businesses like to claim being a "startup" as it
| brings connotations of innovation, dynamism, coolness,
| being the "next big thing" etc. There are many senses of
| the word, and it can be used in different ways (e.g. I work
| at a small business which has some elements of startup
| culture, and it's not an incorrect way to give people a
| sense of what it's like here - but we're definitely well
| established) but I think often being one of the "cool kids"
| is part of the motivation.
| osigurdson wrote:
| The worst usage of AI is "content dilution" where you take a few
| bullet points and generate 5 paragraphs of nauseating slop. These
| days, I would gladly take badly written content from humans
| filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes over that.
| jjav wrote:
| > generate 5 paragraphs of nauseating slop
|
| Which then nobody will ever read, they'll just copy it into the
| AI bot to summarize into a few bullet points.
|
| The amount of waste is quite staggering in this back and forth
| game.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| > Which then nobody will ever read, they'll just copy it into
| the AI bot to summarize into a few bullet points.
|
| Which more often than not will lose or distort the original
| intention behind the first 5 bullet points.
|
| Which is why I avoid using LLMs for writing.
| harvey9 wrote:
| It's pretty awesome that we now have nondeterministic .Zip
| collingreen wrote:
| /dev/yolo
| rvz wrote:
| Ok fair enough, feel more of the AGI.
| AGI-slop wrote:
| AI will with certainty increase productivity of % and the rest
| will fall behind, perhaps dramatically. Effectiveness with AI can
| still be a grind, beyond simple prompting, we are getting lots of
| expensive AI tools heavily subsidized right now, that may not
| always be the case.
| snorbleck wrote:
| yeah, we're f&%^ed
| ponector wrote:
| Fired?
| mikestew wrote:
| Your regex parser is broken if your answer is a five char
| string.
| theultdev wrote:
| it's probably the ^
| irusensei wrote:
| Microsoft is all about this. You know how they also force stuff
| you don't want on the OS? Somewhere within Microsoft there might
| be a dashboard where they show their investors people are using
| Bing and Copilot. Borderline financial scam if you think about
| it.
| cons0le wrote:
| Copy and paste is not working reliably in in windows anymore;
| coincidentally it's breaking at the same time Msoft is moving
| to replace all copy/paste with OCR only. It's garbage
| dandelionv1bes wrote:
| Genuinely VSCode has been broken for me for with copying due
| to it desperately trying to vibe code for me. You've reminded
| me to fix that.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Had the same issue switching to cursor. Cmd + k multiple
| selection skip is now no longer the key map. Drives me
| fucking nuts.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I haven't noticed this, also how exactly would OCR copy paste
| work? In order to copy text I would need to select text,
| which would mean it's already encoded as text.
| connicpu wrote:
| That's why this was the year I finally dropped Windows and
| VSCode forever. Not that hard for me because all the games I
| play work flawlessly in Proton, and I already used Linux at
| work.
| miramba wrote:
| What is your replacement for VSCode?
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Not who you responded to, but for a GUI editor I tend to
| like Zed, and for terminal I like Helix. Yes, Neovim is
| probably better to learn because Vim motions are
| everywhere, but I like Helix's more "batteries included"
| approach.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| They've been all about this since Windows 95.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| The Copilot button that comes on new laptops is the Darkest
| Pattern I have ever seen. UI exploitation that has jumped the
| software / hardware gap.
|
| A student will be showing me something on their laptop, their
| thumb accidentally grazes it because it's larger than the
| modifier keys and positioned so this happens as often as
| possible. The computer stops all other activity and shifts all
| focus to the Copilot window. Unprompted, the student always says
| something like "God, I hate that so much."
|
| If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using
| it.
| politelemon wrote:
| I'm having a hard time believing any of this, and am tempted to
| think this might be in bad faith. It's true it's a bit
| ambitious on their part that they replaced the right side key,
| but it isn't larger than normal and it's not positioned any
| differently than normal keys. Working with hundreds of laptops
| and humans, several ham fisted, on a daily basis I've not seen
| this at all.
|
| Further, a dark pattern is where you are led towards a specific
| outcome but are pulled insidiously towards another. This
| doesn't really fall into that definition.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I
| hate that so much."
|
| ... Dare I ask how Copilot typically responds to that? (They're
| doing voice detection now, right?)
|
| > If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into
| using it.
|
| They delude themselves that they're doing no such thing. Of
| course the feature is _so_ useful that you 'd want to be able
| to access it as easily as possible in any context.
| collingreen wrote:
| And the telemetry doesn't lie! Look how many people are
| clicking that button! KPIs go brrrrrrr
| sethops1 wrote:
| What's sad is how real this is.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| BTW, the context is that one thing I teach is 3d modeling
| software, so the students are following my instructions to
| enter keyboard commands. It's usually Rhino3d where using the
| spacebar to repeat the last command is common.
|
| > ... Dare I ask how Copilot typically responds to that?
| (They're doing voice detection now, right?)
|
| Just as a generalization, the dozen or so times this has
| happened this semester the pop-up is accompanied by an "ugh"
| then after the window pops up from the taskbar the student
| immediately clicks back into the program we're using. It
| seems like they're used to dealing with it already. I haven't
| seen any voice interaction.
|
| I mean, the statistics say the students use AI plenty - they
| just seem annoyed by the interruption. Which I can agree
| with.
|
| > They delude themselves that they're doing no such thing. Of
| course the feature is so useful that you'd want to be able to
| access it as easily as possible in any context.
|
| Exactly.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Is it possible to permanently disable Gemini on Android? I keep
| getting it inserted into my messages and other places, and it's
| horrible to think that I'm one misclick away from turning it on.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Sorry, you've irrevocably consented by touching a button that
| appeared above what you were trying to tap half a millisecond
| earlier.
| withinboredom wrote:
| That only happens with Apple, so it's fine.
| ajkjk wrote:
| My feeling is we need laws to stop it
| rubyfan wrote:
| The industry agrees with you, hence the regulatory capture.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Too big to fail now
| DavidPiper wrote:
| If it only takes a few years for a private entity to become
| "too big to fail" and quasi-immune to government
| regulation, we have a real problem.
| fyrn_ wrote:
| An yeah, and honestly we do seem to have a real problem.
| Here's hoping OpenAI doesn't get the bailout they seem to
| be angling for..
| crazygringo wrote:
| You don't like some features being added to products so you
| want _laws_ against adding certain features?
|
| I might not like a certain feature, but I'd dislike the
| government preventing companies from adding features a whole
| lot more. The thought of that terrifies me.
|
| (To be clear, legitimate regulations around privacy, user
| data, anti-fraud, etc. are fine. But just because you find AI
| features to be something you don't... like? That's not a
| legitimate reason for government intervention.)
| MangoToupe wrote:
| What is so terrifying about exerting democratic control
| over software critical to exist in society?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _over software critical to exist in society?_
|
| I don't know what that means grammatically.
|
| But you could ask, what is so terrifying about exerting
| democratic control over people's free speech, over the
| political opinions they're allowed to express?
|
| The answer is, because it infringes on freedom. As long
| as these AI features aren't harming anyone -- if your
| only complaint is you find their presence annoying, in a
| product you have a free choice in using or not using --
| then there's no democratic justification for passing laws
| against them. Democratic _rights_ take precedence.
| esseph wrote:
| Newsflash
|
| If voters Democratically decide to do something, that's
| democracy at work.
| crazygringo wrote:
| "Newsflash", the entire point of constitutions that
| enumerate rights is that fundamental rights and freedoms
| may not be abridged even by majority decision.
|
| If a Supreme Court strikes down a majority-passed law
| limiting free speech guaranteed by the Constitution,
| _that 's_ democracy at work.
| esseph wrote:
| If they can't be abridged, then why do we have
| amendments?
|
| And no, that would be the courts at work, which may or
| may not be beholden to the whims of other political
| figures.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It takes more than majority vote to add a new amendment.
|
| Go ahead and try, but I don't think you'll find that an
| amendment to restrict people's freedoms is going to be
| very popular. Because it will be seen as anti-democratic.
| collingreen wrote:
| This is the argument against all customer protection as
| well as things like health codes, right?
|
| Nobody is FORCING you to go to that restaurant so it's
| antidemocracy to take away their freedom to not wash
| their hands when they cook?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Please see the part of my comment where I say as long as
| it's not harming anyone.
| lenkite wrote:
| > As long as these AI features aren't harming anyone
|
| Why do you say this ? They are clearly harming the
| privacy of people. Or you don't in privacy as a right ?
| But, a lot of people do - democratically.
| crazygringo wrote:
| If you can show it's harming privacy, then regulate the
| privacy. That's legitimate. But I assume you're talking
| about AI training, not feature usage.
|
| Trying to regulate whether an end-user feature is
| available just because you don't "like" AI creep is no
| different from trying to regulate that user interfaces
| ought to use flat design rather than 3D effects like
| buttons with shadows. It would be an illegitimate use of
| government power.
| smt88 wrote:
| You're trying to make it sound like a corporation's right
| to force AI on us is equivalent to an individual's right
| to speech, which is idiotic in its face. But I'd also
| point out that _speech is regulated_ in the US, so you
| 're still not making the point you think you're making.
|
| And as far as I'm concerned, as long as Google and Apple
| have a monopoly on smartphone software, they should be
| regulated into the ground. Consumers have no
| alternatives, especially if they have a job.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's not "idiotic on its face" and that's not appropriate
| for HN. Please see the guidelines:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Code and software are very much forms of speech in a
| legal sense.
|
| And free speech is regulated in cases of harm, like
| violent threats or libel. But there's no harm here in any
| legal sense. People are just unhappy with the product UX
| -- that there are buttons and areas dedicated to AI
| features.
|
| Companies should absolutely have the freedom to build the
| products they want as long as there's no actual harm. If
| you merely don't like a UX, use a competing product. If
| you don't like the UX of any product, then tough.
| Products aren't usually perfectly what you want, and
| that's OK.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I think it's more about enforcing having easy mechanisms to
| opt out, which seem to be absent with regards to AI
| integration.
|
| It's better to assume good faith when providing a counter
| argument.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That doesn't change anything. If there aren't any harms
| except that certain people don't "like" a feature, it's
| not the government's role to force companies to allow
| users to opt out of features. If you don't like a
| feature, don't buy the product. The government should not
| be micromanaging product design.
| saratogacx wrote:
| I uninstall the gemini app and disable the google app. It seems
| they are heavily linked so remmoving it may do the trick. As a
| practice I don't use any google apps if I can find a good
| replacement so I am not sure if messages is impacted.
| cnees wrote:
| Amazon's Price History feature certainly doesn't need to open
| their AI assistant, but in addition to be graph I came for, I get
| a little summary of the graph. I really hope they aren't using an
| LLM for that when all it's doing is telling me it's the lowest
| price in 30 days.
| crabmusket wrote:
| That's the kind of lazy bullshit idea that, to me, exemplifies
| the AI hype slop era we're in. The point of a chart is to
| communicate visually. If the chart isn't clear without a
| supplemental explanation, why is it there?
|
| If user research indicates your chart isn't clear enough, then
| improve the chart. But what are the odds they did any user
| research? They probably just ran an A/B test and saw number go
| up because of the novelty factor.
| 65 wrote:
| Oh how I'd like the AI bubble to pop already when ROIs don't
| justify the cost. I like AI for things like getting
| recommendations or classifying images. And yet execs feel the
| need to force every possible use case down our throats even if
| they don't make any sense or make quality worse.
|
| E.g. Programming - and I do judge not only those who use AI to
| code but execs who force people to use AI to code. Sorry, I'd
| like to know how my code works. Sorry, you're not an efficient
| worker, you're just making yourself dumber and churning out
| garbage software. It will be a competitive advantage for me when
| slop programmers don't know how to do anything and I can actually
| solve problems. Silicon Valley tech utopians cannot convince me
| otherwise. I don't think poorly socialized dweebs know much about
| anything other than their AI girlfriends providing them with a
| simulation of what it feels like to not be lonely.
| zahlman wrote:
| As I click into this thread from the front page, "Writing a Good
| Claude.md" appears immediately above it. Sigh.
| rlt wrote:
| I don't we're at the "companies bought too many GPUs" stage yet.
| My understanding is they still can't get enough GPUs, or data
| centers to put them in, or power to run them. Most companies
| don't even own them, they rent from the clouds.
|
| We _are_ , however, at the "we need an AI strategy" stage, so
| execs will throw anything and everything at the wall to see what
| sticks.
| bdbdbdb wrote:
| They can't get enough GPUs right now, with VCs pumping money
| into them, but that can very quickly turn into "we're out of
| money, what do we do with all these GPUs?"
| akomtu wrote:
| AI can be thought of as a parasitic lifeform: it feeds on truth
| and excretes slop. We know AI is no good for us, but those
| pushing it have a nefarious plan: make people dependent on it, so
| we can't get rid of this parasite without destroying our society.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| VSCode feels like it's in the "brand withdrawal" phase of its
| lifespan. I've turned off the sneakily named "Chat" and yet it
| still shows the chat sometimes when I toggle the bottom bar
| visibility.
|
| > We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead
| of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.
|
| I'm not sure I have an idea of what this might look like. Do they
| want money? What might that model look like? Do they want credit?
| How would that be handled? Do they want to be consulted? How does
| that get managed?
| bloppe wrote:
| It probably starts with a reexamination of copyright law, which
| has always been a pragmatic rather than a principled system,
| but has not noticeably changed since the digital revolution.
|
| Copyright is meant to encourage more publication by providing
| publishers with (temporary) control over their products after
| having released them to the public. Once the copyright expires,
| the work enters the public domain, which is really the end goal
| of copyright law. If publishers start to feel like LLMs are
| undermining that control, they might publish less original
| work, and therefore less stuff will eventually enter the public
| domain, which is considered bad for society. We're already
| seeing some effects of this as traffic (and ad revenue) to
| various websites has fallen significantly in the wake of LLM
| proliferation, which lowers the incentive to publish anything
| original in the first place.
|
| Anyway, I'm not sure how best to adapt copyright law to this
| new world. Some people have thought about it though:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives
| serial_dev wrote:
| Just like one of crypto's biggest real world uses ended up
| being scams, LLMs are tools for bypassing copyright and
| enabling plagiarism with plausible deniability.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This seems like a fairly reasoned screed. I can't find much to
| disagree with.
|
| I am, personally, quite optimistic about the potential for "AI,"
| but there's still plenty of warts.
|
| Just a few minutes ago, I was going through a SwiftUI debugging
| session with ChatGPT. SwiftUI View problems are notoriously
| difficult to debug, and the LLM got to the "let's try circling
| twice widdershins" stage. At that point, I re-engaged my brain,
| and figured out a _much_ simpler solution than the one proposed.
|
| However, it gave me the necessary starting point to figure it
| out.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| >> It is time to do AI the right way.
|
| Some "No True Scotsman"-flavored cope.
| tim333 wrote:
| In addition to the annoyances mentioned, the pushing of AI may be
| leading to a massive waste of money and resources. I'm sure if,
| instead of AI being shoved in, want it or not, they said pay $1
| if you want AI, the number of data centers needed would be
| reduced dramatically.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> the pushing of AI may be leading to a massive waste of money
| and resources
|
| And massive amounts of energy to run these new fangled AI data
| centers. Not sure if you lumped that in with "resources", but
| yes we're already seeing it:
|
| _A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000
| households, and the largest under development will consume 20
| times more, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
| They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to
| keep all that computer hardware cool._
|
| https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/nx-s1-5565147/google-ai-data-...
| btbuildem wrote:
| I mean, we're in the upslope stage of the hype/bubble cycle. Once
| this pops and 80% of invested people lose their shirts, the long-
| term adoption cycle will play out much more reasonably, more like
| OP wishes.
| qustrolabe wrote:
| What examples of AI integrations annoy you? Because I have such
| wonderful time randomly discovering AI integrations where they
| actually fit nicely: 1) marimo documentation has ask button to
| quickly get some help, kind of like way smarter RAG; 2) postman
| has AI that can write little scripts that visualize responses
| however you want (for example I turned bunch of user ids into
| profile links so that I could visit all of them); 3) Grok button
| on each Twitter post is just amazing to quickly get into what
| post even references and talks about. 4) Google's AI Mode saved
| me many clicks, even just Gemini that can quickly fetch when
| certain TV Show goes live and make reminder is amazing
| croes wrote:
| On Windows: Notepad and Edge Developer Tools
| evil-olive wrote:
| > Grok button on each Twitter post is just amazing to quickly
| get into what post even references and talks about.
|
| when Charlie Kirk was shot, and the video was posted to
| Twitter, people asked Grok to "fact-check" it...and Grok told
| them the videos were fake and Kirk was alive. [0]
|
| Grok also spread misinformation about the identity of the
| shooter. [1]
|
| > On Friday morning, after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced that
| the suspect in custody was Robinson, Grok's replies to X users'
| inquiries about him were contradictory. One Grok post said
| Robinson was a registered Republican, while others reported he
| was a nonpartisan voter. Voter registration records indicate
| Robinson is not affiliated with a political party.
|
| and that's just one particularly egregious event in a long
| string of problems, such as the MechaHitler thing. [2] and the
| Elon Musk piss-drinking thing. [3]
|
| so if you're going to defend these "AI" integrations as being
| useful and helpful...I dunno, Grok is probably not a good
| example to point to.
|
| 0: https://www.engadget.com/ai/grok-claimed-the-charlie-kirk-
| as...
|
| 1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-false-claims-charlie-kirk-
| de...
|
| 2: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-
| musk-...
|
| 3: https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-could-drink-piss-better-
| th...
| rmnclmnt wrote:
| > We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). We don't
| need a digital god. We just need software that works.
|
| Yeah, I think the days of working software are over (at least
| deterministically)
| netfortius wrote:
| Sure! [1]
|
| [1] https://www.techspot.com/news/110418-nvidia-jensen-huang-
| urg...
| firefoxd wrote:
| AI reminds me of the time Google+ was being shoved down our
| throats. If you randomly clicked on more that 7 hyperlinks on the
| internet, you'd magically sign up for google plus.
|
| Around that time, one of my employer's website had added google
| plus share buttons to all the links on the homepage. It wasn't a
| blog, but imagine a blog homepage with previews of the last 30
| articles. Now each article had a google plus tag on it. I was
| called to help because the load time for the page had grown from
| seconds to a few minutes. For each article, they were adding a
| new script tag and a google plus dynamic tag.
|
| It was fixed, but so much resources were wasted for something
| that eventually disappeared. Ai will probably not disappear, but
| I'm tired of the busy work around it.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| The difference was that Google Plus was actually kind of cool.
| I'm not excusing them shoving it down your throat, but at least
| it was well designed.
|
| Most of the AI currently represent misadventures in software
| design at a time when my Fitbit charge can't even play nice
| with my pixel 7 phone. How does that even happen?
| insin wrote:
| All that time and effort that went into forcing Google+
| everywhere and its legacy is just lots of people accidentally
| ending up with 2 YouTube accounts from when they were messing
| with that
| thih9 wrote:
| What I also dislike about the AI is that it promotes a mainframe-
| like development workflow. Schedule your computation, pay for the
| usage, etc. Any chance this particular trend stops or reverses?
| Are we ever going to have local AI that is in practice comparable
| and sufficient?
| simianparrot wrote:
| You don't need it for development. Neither locally nor on the
| mainframe. Money saved.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| This might be obvious but I think the only way forwards is to
| disengage in services offered by these mega-tech companies.
| Degoogling has become popular enough to foster open communities
| that prioritize their time and effort to keep softwares free from
| parasitic enterprises.
|
| For instance, I am fiddling with LineageOS on a Pixel (ironically
| enough) that minimizes my exposure to Google's AI antics. That
| doesn't mean to say it is easy or sustainable, but enough of us
| need to stop participating in their bad bets to force upon that
| realization.
| smt88 wrote:
| No one with a white-collar job in the US can get away from
| Google and Microsoft. We're forced to use one or the other, and
| some of us are forced to use both.
|
| That's not to mention all the other tech companies pushing AI
| (which is honestly all of them).
| MinimalAction wrote:
| Agreed. At the level of companies, it is hard to find any
| practical solution. Personally, I am trying to do what I can.
| encomiast wrote:
| I'm hoping "degoogle" is the 2026 word of the year.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| My Healthcare providers App in Germany refuses to work on
| anything that isn't a Phone running official Google^tm
| verified^(r) and hardware attested OS. Same with some banks.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| I feel things like these should be illegal. There must be
| other genuine ways to verify the end user.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Lots of things in life seem to be the majority having to go along
| with the decisions of the minority. I remember in 2012 when
| Facebook put white chevrons for previous- and next-photo in the
| web photo gallery product and thinking how this one product
| decision by a handful of punks has now been foisted on the world.
| At the time I was really into putting my photography on FB and,
| somewhat pretentiously, it really pissed me off to start having
| UI elements stuck on it!
|
| Car dashboards without buttons, TVs sold with 3D glasses
| (remember that phase?), material then flat design, larger and
| larger phones: the list is embarrasing to type because it feels
| like such a stereotypical nerd complaint list. I think it's true
| though -- the tech PMs are autocrats and have such a bizarrely
| outsized impact on our lives.
|
| And now with AI, too. I just interacted with duck.ai, duck duck
| go's stab at a bot. I long for a little more conservatism.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Boomers in the manager class love AI because it sells the promise
| of what they've longed for for decades: a perfect servant that
| produces value with no salary, no need for breaks, no pushback,
| no workers comp suits, etc.
|
| The thing is, AI did suck in 2023, and even in 2024, but recently
| the best AI models are veering into _not sucking_ territory,
| which when you look at it from a distance makes sense, eventually
| if you throw the smartest researchers on the planet and billions
| of dollars at a problem, something eventually will give and the
| wheels will start turning.
|
| There is a strange blindness many people have on here, a
| steadfast belief that AI just will just never end up working or
| always be a scam, but the massive capex on AI now is predicated
| on the eventual turning of the fledgling LLM's into self-adaptive
| systems that can manage any cognitive task better than a human. I
| don't see how the improvements we've seen over the past few years
| in AI aren't surely heading in that direction.
| bkolobara wrote:
| It still kinda sucks though. You can make it work, but you can
| also easily end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to make
| it do something that it's just incapable of. And it's
| impossible to know upfront if it will work. It's more like
| gambling.
|
| I personally think we have reached some kind of local maximum.
| I work 8 hours per day with claude code, so I'm very much aware
| of even subtle changes in the model. Taking into account how
| much money was thrown at it, I can't see much progress in the
| last few model iterations. Only the "benchmarks" are improving,
| but the results I'm getting are not. If I care about some work,
| I almost never use AI. I also watch a lot of people streaming
| online to pick up new workflows and often they say something
| like "I don't care much about the UI, so I let it just do its
| thing". I think this tells you more about the current state of
| AI for coding than anything else. Far from _not sucking_
| territory.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > And let's be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General
| Intelligence).
|
| In general, I think we want to have it, just like nuclear fusion,
| interplanetary and interstellar colonization, curing cancer, etc.
| etc.
|
| We don't "need" it similar to people in 1800s don't need electric
| cars or airports.
|
| Who owns AGI or what purpose the AGI believe it has is a separate
| discussion - similar to how airplanes can be used to transport
| people or fight wars. Fortunately today, most airplanes are made
| to transport people and connect the world.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| There's a humorous vignette in season 2 of "A Man on the Inside":
|
| Our heroes are in the office of a tech billionaire who says "See
| that coffee machine? Just speak what you want. It can make any
| coffee drink."
|
| So one character says "Half caf latte" and the machine does
| nothing except open a small drawer.
|
| "You have to spit in the drawer so it can collect your DNA--then
| it will make your coffee" the billionaire says.
|
| This pretty much sums up the whole tech scene today. Any good
| engineer could build that coffee machine, but no VC would fund
| her company without that spit drawer.
| bentt wrote:
| This is just another example of getting the actual problem wrong.
|
| When he says "billionaires making more billions" it's really off
| the mark. These people are not forcing AI down our throats to
| make billions.
|
| They are doing it so they can win.
|
| Winning means victory in a zero sum game. This is a game that is
| zero sum because the people that play it think that way. However,
| the point is not to make money. That's a side effect.
|
| They want to win so the other guys don't. That means power,
| growth, prestige, and winning. Winning just to win.
|
| Once people start to understand that this is the prime directive
| for the elite in the tech business, the easier it is for everyone
| to defend against it.
|
| The way you defend against it is to make it non-zero sum. Spread
| the ideas out. Give people choices. Act more like Tim Berners Lee
| and less like Zuck. This will mean less money, sure, but more to
| the point, it deprives anyone of being "the winner". We should
| all celebrate any moves that take power away from the few and
| redistribute it to many. Money will be made in the process, but
| that's okay.
| mrcsharp wrote:
| > And let's be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General
| Intelligence). We don't need a digital god. We just need software
| that works.
|
| We (You and I) don't. Shareholders absolutely need it for that
| line to go further up. They love the idea of LLMs, AI, and AGI
| for the sole reason that it will help them reduce the cost of
| labour massively. Simple as that.
|
| > I will use what creates value for me. I will not buy anything
| that is of no use to me.
|
| If only everyone was thinking this way. So many around these
| parts have no self-preservation tendencies at all.
| ziggure wrote:
| I love that the picture in the article is AI-generated
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >I will not allow AI to be pushed down my throat just to justify
| your bad investment.
|
| Unfortunately these reckless investments are likely to cause
| massive collateral damage to us 'little people'. But I'm sure the
| billionaires will be just fine.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-30 23:00 UTC)