Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries

Every time some product or service introduces AI (or more accurately shoves it down our throats) people start looking for a way to get rid of it.

It's so strange how much money and time companies are pouring into "features" that the public continues to reject at every opportunity.

At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast numbers of employees out of work and allow companies to use the massive amounts of data they've collected about us against us more effectively. All the AI being shoehorned into products and services now are mostly to test, improve, and advertise for the AI being used, not to provide any value for users who'd rather have nothing to do with it.

I am totally in the same boat but also I do suspect it is a minority. It’s the same way that some people really want open source bootloaders, but 99.99% of people do not care at all. Maybe AI assistants in random places just aren’t that compatible with people on HN but are possibly useful for a lot of people not on HN?

> It’s the same way that some people really want open source bootloaders, but 99.99% of people do not care at all.

In fairness to the 99.99% they don't even know what a bootloader is and if they understood the situation and the risks many of them would also favor an open option.

I don't think the rejection of AI is primarily a HN thing though. It's my non-tech friends and family who have been most vocal in complaining about it. The folks here are more likely to have browser extensions and other workarounds or know about alternative services that don't force AI on you in the first place.

> In fairness to the 99.99% they don't even know what a bootloader is

True. And awareness and education is very important for useful discourse.

> if they understood the situation and the risks many of them would also favor an open option.

Raising my hand as one of those people who knows what a bootloader is and also doesn't currently care about an open option. Maybe at some time in the future I will again, but for now it is very far down on my list of concerns.

I suspect whether or not AI is useful/high-quality/"good"/etc is just not important to most poeple at the moment. If they are laid off from their jobs in the future and replaced with an AI, I suspect they'll start caring more.

But in the general case, I've found "caring ahead-of-time" (for want of a better phrase) is a very hard thing to encourage, despite the fact that it's one of the most effective things you can do if you direct it at the "right" avenues (i.e. those that will affect you directly in the future).