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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

(www.honest-broker.com)
451 points imartin2k | 3 comments | 06 Jul 25 06:19 UTC | HN request time: 2.145s | 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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1. babymetal ◴[06 Jul 25 13:41 UTC] No.44480745[source]▶
I'm a bookseller who often uses Ingram to buy books wholesale when I'm not buying direct from publishers. I've used them for their distribution service since opening 5 years ago because they are the only folks in town who can help bootstrap a very small business with coverage of all the major publishers (in the U.S.). They're great at that, for a small cut in revenue.

Six-plus months ago they put a chatbot in the bottom right corner of their website that literally covers up buttons I use all the time for ordering, so that I have to scroll now in order to access those controls (Chrome, MacOS). After testing it with various queries it only seems to provide answers to questions in their pre-existing support documentation.

This is not about choice (see above, they are the only game in town), and it is not about entitlement (we're a tiny shop trying to serve our customers' often obscure book requests). They seemed to literally place the chatbot buttons onto their website with no polling of their users. This is an anecdotal report about Ingram specifically.

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2. brookst ◴[06 Jul 25 15:57 UTC] No.44481819[source]▶
Is it specific to AI or have they made other bad UI choices over the years?
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3. babymetal ◴[06 Jul 25 17:57 UTC] No.44482723[source]▶
Very recently their "advanced search" page was redone with a totally different and slightly more modern styling (prior to addition of the chat expert overlaid in the corner). The rest of Ingram's ordering site is still the same as five years ago and is clearly older than that.

That's objective; subjectively, it feels like there are individuals who were given the ability to "try new stuff" and "break things" who chose to follow the hype around features that look like this. The chat button seems to me to be an exercise in following-the-herd which actually sucks for me as a user with it blocking my old buttons.