The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

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 downloaded a Quordle game on Android yesterday. It pushes you to buy a premium subscription, and you know what that gets you? AI chat inside the game.

I'm not unwilling to use AI in places where I choose. But let's not pretend that just because people do use it in one place, they are willing to have it shoved upon them in every other place.

If I want to use ChatGPT I will go and use ChatGPT myself without a middleman. I don't need every app and website to have it's own magical chat interface that is slow, undiscoverable and makes the stuff up half the time.

I actually quite like the AI-for-search use case. I can't load all of a company's support documents and manuals into ChatGPT easily; if they've done that for me, great!

I was searching for something on Omnissa Horizon here: https://docs.omnissa.com/

It has some kind of ChatGPT integration, and I tried it and it found the answer I was looking for straight away, after 10 minutes of googling and manual searching had failed.

Seems to be not working at the moment though :-/

Would you like your Facebook feed or Twitter or even Hacker News feed inserted in between your work emails or while you are shopping for clothes on a completely different website?

If you answer no, does that make you an unwilling user of social media? It’s the most visited sites in the world after all, how could randomly injecting it into your GPS navigation system be a poor fit?

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.

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.

A friend of mine is a 65 years old philosopher who uses it to translate ancient greek texts or generate arguments between specific philosophers.

I know plenty of anti-AI people who are older and younger than their 30s.

Agreed. My mother and aunts are using ChatGPT all the time. It has really massive market penetration in a way I (a software engineer and AI skeptic/“realist”) didn’t realize. Now, do they care about meta’s AI? Idk, but they’re definitely using AI a lot

Isn’t it fascinating how all of a sudden we swap energy saving and data protection for convenience.

We won’t solve climate change but we will have elaborate essays why we failed.

It’s popular by scammers too.

I wonder how many uses of Chatgpt and such are malicious.

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.

In mid-90s, people who are now in their 30s were about 5 years old. Their formative age was from 2005 to 2015, and yes, things were staying relatively the same during this time.

Smart phones? Mobile internet? Streaming? Steam? Almost none of these were used, or very-very few people in 2005, if they existed at all. The internet of 2005 was completely different than 2015. But heck even in real life. My home country’s weather was very different in 2005 than 10 years later. Cheap flight tickets started to change our travelling pattern completely. Even my parents started to not watch TV before 2015. We had 3 TVs in 2005 in a home. In 2015 the same family had 1 in 3 different flats. And that was used rarely. Very rarely. The consumption of news changed completely.

So what are you talking about?

I think for the majority of the population, solving climate change is a non-goal. Even people who ostensibly care about it aren't willing to sacrifice anything for it.

How long will that remain true though? The effects of climate change will only get worse.

Even when it's a goal, it's one that only works with a collective action and vanishingly few defectors; and the more defectors, the easier it becomes to tell oneself a narrative that ones own actions don't matter because those defectors have already broken it anyway.

Personally, I'm still optimistic, at least for the emissions due to primary energy, because renewables and storage are just so ridiculously cheap now.

Unfortunately, all the other emissions are still enough that prisoner's dilemma type defection still comes into play. But I'm hopeful for cement, and have good reason to expect electrolytic reduction of metal oxides (beyond just aluminium) to become viable soon, as the primary energy is made increasingly renewable and cheap.

Elaborate wrong essays why we failed.

The post is not about ChatGPT (and its like), it's about "AI" being forced into services that have been working just fine without AI for a long time.

I got my first smartphone in 2004, in 2007 there was already iPhone and everyone was on Facebook.

All these things you mention are completely minor compared to the seismic changes in 1995-2001 and 2016-2025.

Give me examples. Also the way you use smartphone was used only by marketing people, and it was not widespread usage at all before iPhone, also the first “smartphone” by marketing people came before your timeline.

People want these features as much as they wanted Cortana on Windows.

Which is to say, there's already a history of AI features failing at a number of these larger companies. The public truly is frequently rejecting them.

The smartphone in question was Palm Tungsten W, the messengers were working great. There was also Nokia 9000 series, but it was more bulky. And Windows CE, of course.

I agree that iPhone was revolutionary, but it was released back in 2007, well within the timeline.

Which timeline? You said that things stayed relatively the same between 2005 and 2015. Then that change was way more between 1995 and 2001, and 2017 and 2025. Then said that iPhone is in the timeline of between 1995 and 2001, or 2017 and 2025, and it was released in 2007. So it’s clearly not in your timeline, and it’s ridiculous that I need to explain this this detailed, that no, your timeline and your dates don’t line up at all. Also give me examples for what you mean larger changes between 1995 and 2001, and 2017 and 2025 for the general populace. That’s because I did everything what I can do now with a smartphone on my dumb phone in 2002, doesn’t mean that people’s life was changed that much, especially that nobody thought that I’m continuously online in 2001, for example.

Also once again, the general populace didn’t call, and doesn’t call those smartphones. I had a P900, and exactly zero people used the word “smartphone” back then, except marketing people. You remember terribly wrong, if you think otherwise. Also smartphone penetration skyrocketed not in 2007, but between 2013 and 2015. In 2010-2011, I was still considered early adopter. In 2015, half of internet users came from a phone. So no, that change didn’t happen before 2005, no matter how you want to distort reality.