The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

If these things are genuinely so universally hated won't they just be.. capitalism'd out of existence? People will stop engaging with them and better products will win

What book store will stock AI slop that no-one wants to buy?

Part of the problem is that some of these services have enormous upfront costs to work at all.

It's fun to say "let's go write a complete replacement for Microsoft Office" or the Adobe suite or what have you, but that has a truly astonishing upfront cost to get to a point where it's even servicing 50% of the use cases, let alone 95 or 99%.

Or there's other examples where it's not obvious there's sufficient interest to finance an alternative - how many people are going to pay for something that replicates solely the old functionality of Microsoft Paint or Notepad, for example.

You might be conflating capitalism (owning things like factories) with consumerism (buying things like widgets).

If all of the factory owners discover a type of widget to sell that can incidentally drive down wages the more units they move, it's unlikely for consumers to be provided much choice in their future widgets.

No, because “better products” won’t exist. That’s the complaint: every company is rushing to throw AI into their stuff, and/or use it to replace humans.

They’re not trying to satisfy customers: they’re answering shareholders. Our system is no longer about offering the best products, it’s about having the market share to force people to do business with you or maybe two other equally bad companies that constantly look for ways to extract more money from people to make shareholders happy. See: Two choices of smartphone OS, ISP regional monopolies or duopolies, two consumer OSes, a handful of mobile carriers, almost all available TVs models being “smart TVs” laden with spyware…

(I’m speaking from the US perspective, this may not be as pronounced elsewhere.)

> it’s about having the market share to force people to do business with you

The answer to this is regulation. See: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/apple-updates-app-...

Outside of a monopoly the best way to extract more money from people is to offer a better product. If AI is being forced and people do hate it, they'll move towards products that don't do that

What happened to Windows Recall being enabled by default? Surely it was in Microsoft's best interest to force it on people. But no, they reversed it after a huge backlash. You see this again and again

Of your examples, ISPs are the only one I can see that's hated without other options. Most people are quite happy with Windows/Mac/Android/iOS/Mint Mobile/Smart-TV-With-No-Internet-Access

The lowest cost (either purchase price, or to produce) products don't create a monopoly

$30 blenders that break in 3 months haven't bankrupted Vitamix

What would happen if Microsoft Office started to charge $250/mo tomorrow?

My guess is you'd very quickly get a bunch of teams scrambling to produce something to compete and capture a huge market by charging a tenth the price. Funding is taken care of when winning there is worth so much

Maybe it won't happen overnight because they're huge software suites.. but it will happen. We need regulations to take care of anti-competitive practices - but after that the market seems to work pretty well for keeping companies in check

Search, music streaming, books: heavily consolidated markets where the value-based offering has supremacy (Google vs any paid search; Spotify/Apple Music vs Tidal; Amazon vs anything). It's the market supremacy that generally allows this.

If quality were a sufficiently motivating aspect, Google's deteriorating search wouldn't be a constant theme on this site, and people on the street would know where to download and play a FLAC file.

That’s a very self-centered view that assumes one’s own definition of “better products” is universal.

The reality is that most people like many of the things you or I might find useless or annoying.

There are better products, but they are niche. You pay more for a non-smart TV because 1) there’s less demand, and 2) the business model is different and requires full payment up front rather than long term monetization.

But who are you or I to look at the market and declare that both sellers and buyers are wrong about what they want? I’m very suspicious of any position as paternalistic as that.

Tidal is a great example. They seem do be doing fine with a niche. If more people wanted what they offer instead of Spotify, Tidal would eat market share.

The market supremacy came afterwards, not before. Most people don't want the expensive premium version - they want good enough at a low investment. And that's fine

There's also a segment of the market that wants the FLAC, premium handcrafted experiences at top price. They're not in direct competition and both can co-exist

My initial point was that companies can't just exploit consumers relentlessly because the market won't let them. The good value option can't just box people in and show them only ads. I bet YouTube would love to show you unskippable ads for 75% of the video length. Good luck staying market leader with that

I don't think Google is a good example here. They've been actively trying to fight and failing against SEO and affiliate spam for a decade. No-one else has solved that problem either which is why Google remains at the top. I personally had a hand-crafted content site thrown out of their search results because of them going after spam