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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

(www.honest-broker.com)
451 points imartin2k | 2 comments | 06 Jul 25 06:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.422s | source
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cs702 ◴[06 Jul 25 12:09 UTC] No.44480036[source]▶
Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on:

"I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI books on Amazon—but I don’t get a choice."

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brookst ◴[06 Jul 25 12:24 UTC] No.44480166[source]▶
It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice.

The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want?

The whole thing is just so damn entitled. If you don’t like something, don’t buy it. If you find the presence of some products offensive in a marketplace, don’t shop there. Spotify is not a human right.

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roxolotl ◴[06 Jul 25 13:02 UTC] No.44480469[source]▶
The Onion has a great response to this from 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY

Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.

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AstroBen ◴[06 Jul 25 13:15 UTC] No.44480553[source]▶
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?

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1. rincebrain ◴[06 Jul 25 13:38 UTC] No.44480716[source]▶
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.

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2. AstroBen ◴[06 Jul 25 14:45 UTC] No.44481216[source]▶
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