Don't push AI down our throats

https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/dont-push-ai-down-our-throats

by nutanc • 8 months ago

431 339 8 months ago

gpt3experiments.substack.com

DaveZale• 8 months ago

try watching a televised American football game. So many ads for AI. Of course ads appeal most to the gullible.

skeeter2020• 8 months ago

Have you seen the Workday ads featuring all the washed-up rock stars? They're pushing managing people AND AI agents - using AI. sigh...

Isamu• 8 months ago

The AI push is not just hype, it’s a scramble for cash. For now the only game plan is to scale up massively with a giant investment gamble, to try to get beyond the obvious limitations that threaten to burst the bubble.

Plus the general economy outlook is negative, AI is the bright spot. They are striving to keep growth up amid downward pressure.

newsclues• 8 months ago

If AI was amazing you wouldn’t need to push it, people would demand it!

You need to push slop, because people don’t really want it.

daft_pink• 8 months ago

The real creepy thing is the way they force you to give up your data with these products. If it were just useful add ons, it wouldn’t bother me, but the fact that Gemini requires you to turn activity history off for paid plans for the promise they won’t train on your data or allow a person to view your prompts is insanity. If you’re paying $20 for Pro or 249.99 for Ultra, you should be able to get activity history without training or review or storing your data for several years.

thomascgalvin• 8 months ago

I have a pixel watch, and my main use for it is setting reminders, like "reminder 3pm put the laundry in the dryer". It's worked fine since the day I bought it.

Last week, they pushed an update that broke all of the features on the watch unless I agreed to allow Google to train their AI on my content.

Teever• 8 months ago

International coordinated action by consumers taking a company to small claims court at the same time around the world to see redress about defective products would be an effective strategy.

verisimi• 8 months ago

I have a pixel watch

you rented/leased a watch for an undefined amount of time.

state_less3• 8 months ago

My Android phone comes hobbled unless I give it all my data to be used for training data (or whatever). I just asked, "Ok Google, play youtube music." And it responded with, "I cannot play music, including YouTube Music, as that tool is currently disabled based on your preferences. I can help you search for information about artists or songs on YouTube, though. By the way, to unlock the full functionality of all Apps, enable Gemini Apps Activity."

I'm new to Android, so maybe I can somehow still preserve some privacy and have basic voice commands, but from what I saw, it required me to enable Gemini Apps Activity with a wall of text I had to agree to in order to get a simple command to play some music to work.

quantified• 8 months ago

Did you agree, or did you give up your data?

Polizeiposaune• 8 months ago

We need consumer protection laws that protect against functional regressions like this -- if a widget could do X when I bought it, it should keep doing X for the life of the product and I shouldn't have to "agree" to an updated license for it to be able to keep doing X.

DrewADesign• 8 months ago

Yeah my pixel watch went straight into the trash. All set. Based on my conversations with folks working on these price products, it seems they simply can’t fathom why anybody is so concerned about privacy when giving it up yields so many useful products and services.

throw-the-towel• 8 months ago

You still have automatic "updates" on? In 2025?

polotics• 8 months ago

https://gitlab.com/natural_aliens/geminichatsaver/-/tree/mai... pull requests and any other feedback welcome

jacquesm• 8 months ago

And the fact that even if you don't want it, don't use it they still charge you as if you do.

gishh• 8 months ago

People pay for this?

1vuio0pswjnm7• 8 months ago

When people pay for YouTube subscriptions to avoid ads, does YouTube/Google continue to collect and store data

Do the terms allow YouTube/Google to use the data collected for any purpose

m463• 8 months ago

The real creepy thing is the way they force you to give up your data with these products

this is pretty much everything everywhere right now. except local linux mostly.

stranded22• 8 months ago

That’s something that really pisses me off - I WANT to use the Gemini pro that is £1.50 more than the £7.99 subscription I was originally paying Google; I said no to using my data to train the AI, and I can’t have history. That’s just ridiculous and means I won’t use it for anything more than maybe images. I’ve had a discount with Claude and that works well for me (audhd translator mostly).

nacozarina• 8 months ago

assume it is being ‘done wrong’, not due to the usual trifecta of greed/evil/stupidity, but due to socio-economic pressure that demands this approach.

AI really needs R&D time, where we first figure out what it’s good for and how best to exploit it.

But R&D for SW is dead. Users proved to be super-resilient to buggy or mis-matched sw. They adapt. ‘Good-enough’ often doesn’t look it. Private equity sez throw EVERYTHING at the wall and chase what sticks…

zzzeek2• 8 months ago

We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.

i support this but the Smarter Than Me types say it's impossible. It's not possible to track down an adequate number of copyright holders, much less get their permission, much less afford to pay them, for the number of works required in order to get the LLM to achieve "liftoff".

I would think that as I use Claude for coding, it would work just as well if it didnt suck down the last three years of NYT articles as if it did. There's a vast amount of content that is in the public domain, and if you're ChatGPT you can make deals with a bunch of big publishers to get more modern content too. But that's my know-nothing take.

maybe the issue is more about the image content. Screw the image content (and definitely the music content, spotify pushing this slop is immensely offensive), pay the artists. My code OTOH is open source, MIT licensed. It's not art at all. Go get it (though throw me a few thousand bucks every year because you want to do the right thing).

FLT8• 8 months ago

It's not' impossible', it's economically unviable. There's a difference. We really should be mandating that companies that don't pay fair market prices for the data they use to train their models must open source everything as reparation to humanity.

bgwalter• 8 months ago

It is not an axiom that LLMs even have the right to achieve "liftoff". They are obvious instruments of plagiarism that often just reorder sentences so as not to get caught. They can be forbidden.

If you don't mind the oligarchs stealing your code, that is your prerogative. Many other people do mind.

NoraCodes• 8 months ago

Why do AI companies get to do whatever they want in order to meet their business goals ("liftoff")?

creata3• 8 months ago

i support this but the Smarter Than Me types say it's impossible.

Adobe has been training models on only licensed media. I'm not sure if it's all their models or just some of them, and I haven't seen the results, but someone's doing it.

zzzeek2• 8 months ago

How ironic it would be for Adobe, the literal 500 ton dreadnaught of copyright, patent, and intellectual property ownership, to be sucking down training content from unlicensed sources. At least something is not entirely wrong in the world today.

shmerl• 8 months ago

As usual, those who spent too much money on it use it as a way to show their investors they didn't waste all that money and to get them to spend even more. That's why it's so messed up.

wasmainiac2• 8 months ago

I will not allow AI to be pushed down my throat just to justify your bad investment.

Pretty much my sentiment too.

exsomet• 8 months ago

The neat thing about all this is that you don’t get a choice!

Your favorite services are adding “AI” features (and raising prices to boot), your data is being collected and analyzed (probably incorrectly) by AI tools, you are interacting with AI-generated responses on social media, viewing AI-generated images and videos, and reading articles generated by AI. Business leaders are making decisions about your job and your value using AI, and political leaders are making policy and military decisions based on AI output.

It’s happening, with you or to you.

hansvm2• 8 months ago

Reasonably far off topic:

Visa hasn't worked for online purchases for me for a few months, seemingly because of a rogue fraud-detection AI their customer service can't override.

Is there any chance that's just a poorly implemented traditional solution rather than feeding all my data into an LLM?

wasmainiac2• 8 months ago

I do have a choice, I just stop using the product. When messenger added AI assistants, I switched to WhatsApp. Now WhatsApp has one too, now I’m using Signal. Wife brought home a win11 laptop, didn’t like the cheeky AI integration, now it runs Linux.

oxag3n• 8 months ago

Even if my favorite service is so irreplaceable, I still can use it without touching AI part of it. If majority who use a popular service never touch AI features, it will inevitably send a message to the owner one way or another - you are wasting money with AI.

codaphiliac• 8 months ago

almost the same as RTO mandates:

we’ll force you to come back to justify sunk money in office space.

datavirtue• 8 months ago

Don't forget about the poor local businesses. Someone needs to pay to keep the executives' lunch spots open.

aetherspawn• 8 months ago

I personally think all the gains in productivity that happened with WFH were just because people were stressed and WFH acted like a pressure relief. But too much of a good thing and people get lazy (seeing it right now, some people are filling full timesheets and not even starting let alone getting through a day of work in a week), so the right balance is somewhere in the middle.

Perhaps… the right balance is actually working only 4 days a week, always from the office, and just having the 5th day proper-off instead.

I think people go through “grinds” to get big projects done, and then plateau’s of “cooling down”. I think every person only has so much grind to give, and extra days doesn’t mean more work, so the ideal employee is one you pay for 3-4 days per week only.

venturecruelty10• 8 months ago

Not for nothing did the endless WSJ and Forbes articles about "commuting for one hour into expensive downtown offices is good, actually" show up around the same time RTO mandates did.

marginalia_nu• 8 months ago

It really gives me the same vibes as the sort of products that go all in on influencer marketing. Nothing has made me less likely to try "Raid Shadow Legends" than a bunch of youtubers faking enthusiasm about it.

It's a sort of pushiness that hints not even the people behind the product are very confident in its appeal.

booleandilemma• 8 months ago

I see comments like this one* and I wonder if the whole AI trend is a giant scam we're getting forced to play along with.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46096603

stego-tech2• 8 months ago

Replace AI with Blockchain. With cloud. With big data. With ERP. With service models. With basically almost any fad since virtualization. It’s the same thing: over-hyped tools with questionable value being shoe-horned into every possible orifice so the investors can make money.

I’m not opposed to any of the above, necessarily. I’ve just always been the type to want to adopt things as they are needed and bring demonstrable value to myself or my employer and not a moment before. That is the problem that capital has tried to solve through “founder mode” startups and exploitative business models: “It doesn’t matter whether you need it or not, what matters is that we’re forcing you to pay for it so we get our returns.”

manphone• 8 months ago

The difference is the level of investment and consumer application for each service - most customers would never be able to tell you what an erp is.

aurareturn2• 8 months ago

  Replace AI with Blockchain. With cloud. With big data. With ERP. With service models. With basically almost any fad since virtualization. It’s the same thing: over-hyped tools with questionable value being shoe-horned into every possible orifice so the investors can make money.

They said the exact same thing when electricity was invented too.

Gas companies said electricity was a fad. Some doctors said electric light harms the eyes. It's too expensive for practical use. Need too much infrastructure investment. AC will kill people with shocks. Electrification will destroy jobs, said gas lamp unions. It's unnatural, said some clergy. And on and on and on...

exasperaited• 8 months ago

This post is just one multipurpose category error.

drivebyhooting• 8 months ago

Electric light indeed harms the eyes.

XorNot• 8 months ago

What an utterly bizarre comparison.

Even the block chain comparison isn't valid because it didn't consist of an "AI" button getting crammed into every single product and website, turned into a popover etc.

stego-tech2• 8 months ago

Thing is though, most folks don't recall that electricity itself wasn't the fad, but some methods of generation were. Same with vehicles, as everyone tried every fuel until we gradually found the ones that worked best in each engine or vehicle.

As I'm seeing from the multitude of folks scrutinizing my clearly exhaustive list of every single technology fad ever (sarcasm, for those unclear), they're missing the forest for the trees and therefore likely to hit every single rung when they fall down a ladder. I'm not saying X or Y wasn't valuable, or wasn't useful, only that they way they're shoved into every single orifice by force is neither of those things to those taken advantage of in the quest for utility.

The point isn't that advancements are bad, the point is the way we force them down the throats of everyone, everywhere, all the time creates a waste of skill and capital for the returns of a very select group of people. The point is that fads are bad, and we should let entities (companies and people) find use in what's offered naturally rather than force-feeding garbage to everyone to see what's actually palatable.

tayo42• 8 months ago

How could say cloud is overhyped when we're at a point where running physical machines is a rare and specialized skill and companies couldn't run their own hardware anymore.

gosub100• 8 months ago

If AI was as great as they pretend, there would be no need to force it on us.

AGI-slop3• 8 months ago

Its the only game in town, and reasonably expected to be close to the last.

InexSquirrel• 8 months ago

What do you mean by that?

DavidPiper2• 8 months ago

It's the classic "You don't need to tell a child that something is fun. The more times you a child something is fun, the more they will doubt you. It's easy to tell if something is fun, because it's fun."

arealaccount• 8 months ago

We don't need to do it this quarter just because some startup has to do an earnings call.

What startups are doing earning calls?

collingreen4• 8 months ago

All the public ones?

TZubiri2• 8 months ago

I'd say at that point they are no longer startups, they've already started up

nutanc3• 8 months ago

Well not exactly earning calls in the classical sense, but haven't you heard about these startups announcing how they have scaled to $100 million in 3 months etc. Maybe revenue calls every quarter.

osigurdson• 8 months ago

The worst usage of AI is “content dilution” where you take a few bullet points and generate 5 paragraphs of nauseating slop. These days, I would gladly take badly written content from humans filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes over that.

jjav• 8 months ago

generate 5 paragraphs of nauseating slop

Which then nobody will ever read, they'll just copy it into the AI bot to summarize into a few bullet points.

The amount of waste is quite staggering in this back and forth game.

andrei_says_• 8 months ago

Which then nobody will ever read, they'll just copy it into the AI bot to summarize into a few bullet points.

Which more often than not will lose or distort the original intention behind the first 5 bullet points.

Which is why I avoid using LLMs for writing.

harvey9• 8 months ago

It's pretty awesome that we now have nondeterministic .Zip

rvz• 8 months ago

Ok fair enough, feel more of the AGI.

AGI-slop3• 8 months ago

AI will with certainty increase productivity of % and the rest will fall behind, perhaps dramatically. Effectiveness with AI can still be a grind, beyond simple prompting, we are getting lots of expensive AI tools heavily subsidized right now, that may not always be the case.

snorbleck• 8 months ago

yeah, we're f&%^ed

ponector• 8 months ago

Fired?

mikestew• 8 months ago

Your regex parser is broken if your answer is a five char string.

irusensei2• 8 months ago

Microsoft is all about this. You know how they also force stuff you don't want on the OS? Somewhere within Microsoft there might be a dashboard where they show their investors people are using Bing and Copilot. Borderline financial scam if you think about it.

cons0le• 8 months ago

Copy and paste is not working reliably in in windows anymore; coincidentally it's breaking at the same time Msoft is moving to replace all copy/paste with OCR only. It's garbage

dandelionv1bes• 8 months ago

Genuinely VSCode has been broken for me for with copying due to it desperately trying to vibe code for me. You’ve reminded me to fix that.

TZubiri2• 8 months ago

I haven't noticed this, also how exactly would OCR copy paste work? In order to copy text I would need to select text, which would mean it's already encoded as text.

keyle• 8 months ago

I haven't used windows for years but the shear amount of commentary on recent changes and the claims are so beyond beliefs...

It reads like a company that is only there to squeeze money out of existing customers and hell bent on revenues above growth. Like one of those portfolio acquisitions.

TiredOfLife• 8 months ago

Msoft is moving to replace all copy/paste with OCR only.

Source?

connicpu3• 8 months ago

That's why this was the year I finally dropped Windows and VSCode forever. Not that hard for me because all the games I play work flawlessly in Proton, and I already used Linux at work.

miramba• 8 months ago

What is your replacement for VSCode?

givemeethekeys• 8 months ago

They've been all about this since Windows 95.

Duanemclemore2• 8 months ago

The Copilot button that comes on new laptops is the Darkest Pattern I have ever seen. UI exploitation that has jumped the software / hardware gap.

A student will be showing me something on their laptop, their thumb accidentally grazes it because it's larger than the modifier keys and positioned so this happens as often as possible. The computer stops all other activity and shifts all focus to the Copilot window. Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much."

If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it.

politelemon• 8 months ago

I'm having a hard time believing any of this, and am tempted to think this might be in bad faith. It's true it's a bit ambitious on their part that they replaced the right side key, but it isn't larger than normal and it's not positioned any differently than normal keys. Working with hundreds of laptops and humans, several ham fisted, on a daily basis I've not seen this at all.

Further, a dark pattern is where you are led towards a specific outcome but are pulled insidiously towards another. This doesn't really fall into that definition.

zahlman2• 8 months ago

Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much."

... Dare I ask how Copilot typically responds to that? (They're doing voice detection now, right?)

If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it.

They delude themselves that they're doing no such thing. Of course the feature is so useful that you'd want to be able to access it as easily as possible in any context.

collingreen4• 8 months ago

And the telemetry doesn't lie! Look how many people are clicking that button! KPIs go brrrrrrr

Duanemclemore2• 8 months ago

BTW, the context is that one thing I teach is 3d modeling software, so the students are following my instructions to enter keyboard commands. It's usually Rhino3d where using the spacebar to repeat the last command is common.

... Dare I ask how Copilot typically responds to that? (They're doing voice detection now, right?)

Just as a generalization, the dozen or so times this has happened this semester the pop-up is accompanied by an "ugh" then after the window pops up from the taskbar the student immediately clicks back into the program we're using. It seems like they're used to dealing with it already. I haven't seen any voice interaction.

I mean, the statistics say the students use AI plenty - they just seem annoyed by the interruption. Which I can agree with.

They delude themselves that they're doing no such thing. Of course the feature is so useful that you'd want to be able to access it as easily as possible in any context.

Exactly.

mmastrac• 8 months ago

Is it possible to permanently disable Gemini on Android? I keep getting it inserted into my messages and other places, and it's horrible to think that I'm one misclick away from turning it on.

Y_Y2• 8 months ago

Sorry, you've irrevocably consented by touching a button that appeared above what you were trying to tap half a millisecond earlier.

withinboredom• 8 months ago

That only happens with Apple, so it's fine.

ajkjk5• 8 months ago

My feeling is we need laws to stop it

rubyfan• 8 months ago

The industry agrees with you, hence the regulatory capture.

Yizahi• 8 months ago

Too big to fail now

crazygringo28• 8 months ago

You don't like some features being added to products so you want laws against adding certain features?

I might not like a certain feature, but I'd dislike the government preventing companies from adding features a whole lot more. The thought of that terrifies me.

(To be clear, legitimate regulations around privacy, user data, anti-fraud, etc. are fine. But just because you find AI features to be something you don't... like? That's not a legitimate reason for government intervention.)

saratogacx• 8 months ago

I uninstall the gemini app and disable the google app. It seems they are heavily linked so remmoving it may do the trick. As a practice I don't use any google apps if I can find a good replacement so I am not sure if messages is impacted.

cnees• 8 months ago

Amazon's Price History feature certainly doesn't need to open their AI assistant, but in addition to be graph I came for, I get a little summary of the graph. I really hope they aren't using an LLM for that when all it's doing is telling me it's the lowest price in 30 days.

crabmusket2• 8 months ago

That's the kind of lazy bullshit idea that, to me, exemplifies the AI hype slop era we're in. The point of a chart is to communicate visually. If the chart isn't clear without a supplemental explanation, why is it there?

If user research indicates your chart isn't clear enough, then improve the chart. But what are the odds they did any user research? They probably just ran an A/B test and saw number go up because of the novelty factor.

65• 8 months ago

Oh how I'd like the AI bubble to pop already when ROIs don't justify the cost. I like AI for things like getting recommendations or classifying images. And yet execs feel the need to force every possible use case down our throats even if they don't make any sense or make quality worse.

E.g. Programming - and I do judge not only those who use AI to code but execs who force people to use AI to code. Sorry, I'd like to know how my code works. Sorry, you're not an efficient worker, you're just making yourself dumber and churning out garbage software. It will be a competitive advantage for me when slop programmers don't know how to do anything and I can actually solve problems. Silicon Valley tech utopians cannot convince me otherwise. I don't think poorly socialized dweebs know much about anything other than their AI girlfriends providing them with a simulation of what it feels like to not be lonely.

zahlman2• 8 months ago

As I click into this thread from the front page, "Writing a Good Claude.md" appears immediately above it. Sigh.

Flipflip79• 8 months ago

What’s the problem there exactly? There’s nothing necessarily diametrically opposed in the two articles. They’re almost complimentary really

protocolture3• 8 months ago

"How to voluntarily use claude to get what you want"

"I dont like being forced to use AI products"

Whats the issue?

brazukadev3• 8 months ago

HN might be the one pushing AI down their users throat with so many top stories every dall, all day.

rlt• 8 months ago

I don’t we’re at the “companies bought too many GPUs” stage yet. My understanding is they still can’t get enough GPUs, or data centers to put them in, or power to run them. Most companies don’t even own them, they rent from the clouds.

We are, however, at the “we need an AI strategy” stage, so execs will throw anything and everything at the wall to see what sticks.

bdbdbdb• 8 months ago

They can't get enough GPUs right now, with VCs pumping money into them, but that can very quickly turn into "we're out of money, what do we do with all these GPUs?"

protocolture3• 8 months ago

“companies bought too many GPUs”

Nuance.

They have insufficient GPUs for the amount of training going on.

If you assume theres a plateau where the benefits of training constantly no longer outweigh the costs, then they probably have too many GPUs.

The question is how far away is that plateau.

brazukadev3• 8 months ago

My understanding is they still can’t get enough GPUs

Enough for what? The adoption is slowing down fast, people are not willing to pay for a chatbox and a 10% better model won't change that.

akomtu• 8 months ago

AI can be thought of as a parasitic lifeform: it feeds on truth and excretes slop. We know AI is no good for us, but those pushing it have a nefarious plan: make people dependent on it, so we can't get rid of this parasite without destroying our society.

Waterluvian• 8 months ago

VSCode feels like it’s in the “brand withdrawal” phase of its lifespan. I’ve turned off the sneakily named “Chat” and yet it still shows the chat sometimes when I toggle the bottom bar visibility.

We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.

I’m not sure I have an idea of what this might look like. Do they want money? What might that model look like? Do they want credit? How would that be handled? Do they want to be consulted? How does that get managed?

bloppe• 8 months ago

It probably starts with a reexamination of copyright law, which has always been a pragmatic rather than a principled system, but has not noticeably changed since the digital revolution.

Copyright is meant to encourage more publication by providing publishers with (temporary) control over their products after having released them to the public. Once the copyright expires, the work enters the public domain, which is really the end goal of copyright law. If publishers start to feel like LLMs are undermining that control, they might publish less original work, and therefore less stuff will eventually enter the public domain, which is considered bad for society. We're already seeing some effects of this as traffic (and ad revenue) to various websites has fallen significantly in the wake of LLM proliferation, which lowers the incentive to publish anything original in the first place.

Anyway, I'm not sure how best to adapt copyright law to this new world. Some people have thought about it though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives

serial_dev• 8 months ago

Just like one of crypto’s biggest real world uses ended up being scams, LLMs are tools for bypassing copyright and enabling plagiarism with plausible deniability.

ChrisMarshallNY• 8 months ago

This seems like a fairly reasoned screed. I can't find much to disagree with.

I am, personally, quite optimistic about the potential for "AI," but there's still plenty of warts.

Just a few minutes ago, I was going through a SwiftUI debugging session with ChatGPT. SwiftUI View problems are notoriously difficult to debug, and the LLM got to the "let's try circling twice widdershins" stage. At that point, I re-engaged my brain, and figured out a much simpler solution than the one proposed.

However, it gave me the necessary starting point to figure it out.

mwkaufma• 8 months ago

> It is time to do AI the right way.

Some "No True Scotsman"-flavored cope.

tim333• 8 months ago

In addition to the annoyances mentioned, the pushing of AI may be leading to a massive waste of money and resources. I'm sure if, instead of AI being shoved in, want it or not, they said pay $1 if you want AI, the number of data centers needed would be reduced dramatically.

burningChrome• 8 months ago

> the pushing of AI may be leading to a massive waste of money and resources

And massive amounts of energy to run these new fangled AI data centers. Not sure if you lumped that in with "resources", but yes we're already seeing it:

A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/nx-s1-5565147/google-ai-data-...

polynomial• 8 months ago

Zero attractor would likely be a safe bet.

btbuildem• 8 months ago

I mean, we're in the upslope stage of the hype/bubble cycle. Once this pops and 80% of invested people lose their shirts, the long-term adoption cycle will play out much more reasonably, more like OP wishes.

qustrolabe• 8 months ago

What examples of AI integrations annoy you? Because I have such wonderful time randomly discovering AI integrations where they actually fit nicely: 1) marimo documentation has ask button to quickly get some help, kind of like way smarter RAG; 2) postman has AI that can write little scripts that visualize responses however you want (for example I turned bunch of user ids into profile links so that I could visit all of them); 3) Grok button on each Twitter post is just amazing to quickly get into what post even references and talks about. 4) Google's AI Mode saved me many clicks, even just Gemini that can quickly fetch when certain TV Show goes live and make reminder is amazing

croes• 8 months ago

On Windows: Notepad and Edge Developer Tools

evil-olive• 8 months ago

Grok button on each Twitter post is just amazing to quickly get into what post even references and talks about.

when Charlie Kirk was shot, and the video was posted to Twitter, people asked Grok to "fact-check" it...and Grok told them the videos were fake and Kirk was alive. [0]

Grok also spread misinformation about the identity of the shooter. [1]

On Friday morning, after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced that the suspect in custody was Robinson, Grok's replies to X users' inquiries about him were contradictory. One Grok post said Robinson was a registered Republican, while others reported he was a nonpartisan voter. Voter registration records indicate Robinson is not affiliated with a political party.

and that's just one particularly egregious event in a long string of problems, such as the MechaHitler thing. [2] and the Elon Musk piss-drinking thing. [3]

so if you're going to defend these "AI" integrations as being useful and helpful...I dunno, Grok is probably not a good example to point to.

0: https://www.engadget.com/ai/grok-claimed-the-charlie-kirk-as...

1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-false-claims-charlie-kirk-de...

2: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...

3: https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-could-drink-piss-better-th...

rmnclmnt• 8 months ago

We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). We don't need a digital god. We just need software that works.

Yeah, I think the days of working software are over (at least deterministically)

netfortius• 8 months ago

Sure! [1]

[1] https://www.techspot.com/news/110418-nvidia-jensen-huang-urg...

firefoxd• 8 months ago

AI reminds me of the time Google+ was being shoved down our throats. If you randomly clicked on more that 7 hyperlinks on the internet, you'd magically sign up for google plus.

Around that time, one of my employer's website had added google plus share buttons to all the links on the homepage. It wasn't a blog, but imagine a blog homepage with previews of the last 30 articles. Now each article had a google plus tag on it. I was called to help because the load time for the page had grown from seconds to a few minutes. For each article, they were adding a new script tag and a google plus dynamic tag.

It was fixed, but so much resources were wasted for something that eventually disappeared. Ai will probably not disappear, but I'm tired of the busy work around it.

LogicFailsMe2• 8 months ago

The difference was that Google Plus was actually kind of cool. I'm not excusing them shoving it down your throat, but at least it was well designed.

Most of the AI efforts currently represent misadventures in software design at a time when my Fitbit charge can't even play nice with my pixel 7 phone. How does that even happen?

chanux• 8 months ago

I remember believing Google+ will win because it was quite nicely done. But I guess it never caught on with the masses to be successful in Google's definition of success (Adsense?).

PS: I was thinking that I didn't notice it being shoved down because I was high on the Koolaid. But I do remember when they shoved it in YouTube comments.

insin• 8 months ago

All that time and effort that went into forcing Google+ everywhere and its legacy is just lots of people accidentally ending up with 2 YouTube accounts from when they were messing with that

audg• 8 months ago

thanks for reminding me why I have two YouTube profiles lol

duxup2• 8 months ago

I liked G+.

It felt like I had some level of control of my feed and what I saw and for the time it existed the content was pretty good :(

thih92• 8 months ago

What I also dislike about the AI is that it promotes a mainframe-like development workflow. Schedule your computation, pay for the usage, etc. Any chance this particular trend stops or reverses? Are we ever going to have local AI that is in practice comparable and sufficient?

simianparrot• 8 months ago

You don’t need it for development. Neither locally nor on the mainframe. Money saved.

thih92• 8 months ago

I don’t need google either, I could read docs or source code and figure things out myself. I do need it if I want to skip parts of coding that are not my focus at the moment - AI is arguably similar.

MinimalAction3• 8 months ago

This might be obvious but I think the only way forwards is to disengage in services offered by these mega-tech companies. Degoogling has become popular enough to foster open communities that prioritize their time and effort to keep softwares free from parasitic enterprises.

For instance, I am fiddling with LineageOS on a Pixel (ironically enough) that minimizes my exposure to Google's AI antics. That doesn't mean to say it is easy or sustainable, but enough of us need to stop participating in their bad bets to force upon that realization.

smt884• 8 months ago

No one with a white-collar job in the US can get away from Google and Microsoft. We're forced to use one or the other, and some of us are forced to use both.

That's not to mention all the other tech companies pushing AI (which is honestly all of them).

MinimalAction3• 8 months ago

Agreed. At the level of companies, it is hard to find any practical solution. Personally, I am trying to do what I can.

encomiast• 8 months ago

I'm hoping "degoogle" is the 2026 word of the year.

IlikeKitties• 8 months ago

My Healthcare providers App in Germany refuses to work on anything that isn't a Phone running official Google^tm verified^(r) and hardware attested OS. Same with some banks.

MinimalAction3• 8 months ago

I feel things like these should be illegal. There must be other genuine ways to verify the end user.

gorgoiler• 8 months ago

Lots of things in life seem to be the majority having to go along with the decisions of the minority. I remember in 2012 when Facebook put white chevrons for previous- and next-photo in the web photo gallery product and thinking how this one product decision by a handful of punks has now been foisted on the world. At the time I was really into putting my photography on FB and, somewhat pretentiously, it really pissed me off to start having UI elements stuck on it!

Car dashboards without buttons, TVs sold with 3D glasses (remember that phase?), material then flat design, larger and larger phones: the list is embarrasing to type because it feels like such a stereotypical nerd complaint list. I think it’s true though — the tech PMs are autocrats and have such a bizarrely outsized impact on our lives.

And now with AI, too. I just interacted with duck.ai, duck duck go’s stab at a bot. I long for a little more conservatism.

8bitsrule• 8 months ago

the tech PMs are autocrats and have such a bizarrely outsized impact on our lives.

They're the ones who are just asking for it ... they, themselves need more forceful training. It's up to us to move slower and fix things.

venturecruelty10• 8 months ago

This is what happens when you let companies become empires, with the tacit agreement of your "democratically-elected" government. In no sane world should my electricity bill go up because Google wants me to put glue on pizza. Unfortunately, I don't think we live in a sane world.

atleastoptimal• 8 months ago

Boomers in the manager class love AI because it sells the promise of what they've longed for for decades: a perfect servant that produces value with no salary, no need for breaks, no pushback, no workers comp suits, etc.

The thing is, AI did suck in 2023, and even in 2024, but recently the best AI models are veering into not sucking territory, which when you look at it from a distance makes sense, eventually if you throw the smartest researchers on the planet and billions of dollars at a problem, something eventually will give and the wheels will start turning.

There is a strange blindness many people have on here, a steadfast belief that AI just will just never end up working or always be a scam, but the massive capex on AI now is predicated on the eventual turning of the fledgling LLM's into self-adaptive systems that can manage any cognitive task better than a human. I don't see how the improvements we've seen over the past few years in AI aren't surely heading in that direction.

bkolobara• 8 months ago

It still kinda sucks though. You can make it work, but you can also easily end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to make it do something that it's just incapable of. And it's impossible to know upfront if it will work. It's more like gambling.

I personally think we have reached some kind of local maximum. I work 8 hours per day with claude code, so I'm very much aware of even subtle changes in the model. Taking into account how much money was thrown at it, I can't see much progress in the last few model iterations. Only the "benchmarks" are improving, but the results I'm getting are not. If I care about some work, I almost never use AI. I also watch a lot of people streaming online to pick up new workflows and often they say something like "I don't care much about the UI, so I let it just do its thing". I think this tells you more about the current state of AI for coding than anything else. Far from _not sucking_ territory.

nephihaha2• 8 months ago

It's not a perfect servant by any means. And let's drop the generation game.

DontForgetMe2• 8 months ago

recently the best AI models are veering into not sucking territory

I agree with your assessment.

I find it absolutely wild that 'it almost doesn't entirely suck, if you squint' is suddenly an acceptable benchmark for a technology to be unleashed upon the public.

We have standards for cars, speakers, clothing, furniture, make up, even literature. Someone can't just type up a few pages of dross and put it though 100 letterboxes without being liable for littering and nuisance. The EU and UK don't allow someone to still phones with a pre-imstalled app that almost performs a function that some users might theoretically want. The public domain has quality standards.

Or rather, it had quality standards. But it's apparently legal to put semi-functioning data-collectors in technologies where nobody asked for them, why isn't it legal to sell chairs that collapse unless you hold them a specific way, clothes that don't actually function as clothes but could be used to make actual clothes by a competent tailor, headphones that can be coaxed into sporadically producing round for minutes at a time?

Either something works too a professional standard or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it is/was not legal to include it in consumer products.

This is why people are more angry than is justified by a single unreliable program. I don't care that much whether LLM's perform the functions that are advertised (and they don't, half the time). I care that after many decades of living in a first world country with consumer protection and minimum standards, all of that seems to have been washed away in the AI wave. When it receeds, we will be left paying first world prices for third world enquiring, now the acceptable quality standard for everything seems to have dropped to 'it can almost certainly be used for its intended purpose at least some times, by some people, with a little effort'.

Aperocky3• 8 months ago

And let’s be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

In general, I think we want to have it, just like nuclear fusion, interplanetary and interstellar colonization, curing cancer, etc. etc.

We don't "need" it similar to people in 1800s don't need electric cars or airports.

Who owns AGI or what purpose the AGI believe it has is a separate discussion - similar to how airplanes can be used to transport people or fight wars. Fortunately today, most airplanes are made to transport people and connect the world.

bluefirebrand3• 8 months ago

In general, I think we want to have it

Outside of tech circles no one I talk to wants AI for anything

nickpp3• 8 months ago

Do they want self driving cars or domestic help robots though?

marcinzm2• 8 months ago

Yet somehow ChatGPT has almost a billion users. Thats a lot of tech bros.

silver_silver• 8 months ago

Can second this. Am the only tech worker among my friends and family and every single one of them reacts to AI the same as to crypto or NFTs

immibis6• 8 months ago

AI does some things but it's nowhere near as good as it has to be to justify its valuations.

sothatsit• 8 months ago

All of my family members bar one use ChatGPT for search, or to come up with recipes, or other random stuff, and really like it. My girlfriend uses it to help her write stories. All of my friends use it for work. Many of these people are non-technical.

You don’t get to 100s of millions of weekly active users with a product only technical people are interested in.

Aperocky3• 8 months ago

I meant as a society we should want AGI, but I understand that's not how most feel.

dreamcompiler• 8 months ago

There's a humorous vignette in season 2 of "A Man on the Inside":

Our heroes are in the office of a tech billionaire who says "See that coffee machine? Just speak what you want. It can make any coffee drink."

So one character says "Half caf latte" and the machine does nothing except open a small drawer.

"You have to spit in the drawer so it can collect your DNA--then it will make your coffee" the billionaire says.

This pretty much sums up the whole tech scene today. Any good engineer could build that coffee machine, but no VC would fund her company without the spit drawer.

bentt• 8 months ago

This is just another example of getting the actual problem wrong.

When he says "billionaires making more billions" it's really off the mark. These people are not forcing AI down our throats to make billions.

They are doing it so they can win.

Winning means victory in a zero sum game. This is a game that is zero sum because the people that play it think that way. However, the point is not to make money. That's a side effect.

They want to win so the other guys don't. That means power, growth, prestige, and winning. Winning just to win.

Once people start to understand that this is the prime directive for the elite in the tech business, the easier it is for everyone to defend against it.

The way you defend against it is to make it non-zero sum. Spread the ideas out. Give people choices. Act more like Tim Berners Lee and less like Zuck. This will mean less money, sure, but more to the point, it deprives anyone of being "the winner". We should all celebrate any moves that take power away from the few and redistribute it to many. Money will be made in the process, but that's okay.

mrcsharp7• 8 months ago

And let’s be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). We don't need a digital god. We just need software that works.

We (You and I) don't. Shareholders absolutely need it for that line to go further up. They love the idea of LLMs, AI, and AGI for the sole reason that it will help them reduce the cost of labour massively. Simple as that.

I will use what creates value for me. I will not buy anything that is of no use to me.

If only everyone was thinking this way. So many around these parts have no self-preservation tendencies at all.

input_sh• 8 months ago

I don't think any of the people at the top actually believe world's-most-average-answer generator is a path that leads us to AGI. It's just a marketing boogeyman and a handy excuse to remove any remnants of agency that the workforce currently has.

seizethecheese6• 8 months ago

Nobody is using tools that create no value for them, that’s an absurd argument. Many are overclocking their AI use because of their self preservation instinct.

callc• 8 months ago

A bit more nuanced: nobody is using tools that have a perceived negative value.

People pushing AI desperately want to convince us the value is positive. 10x productivity! Fire all your humans!

In reality, depending on the use-case, the value is much smaller. And can be negative thinking about the total value over long term (incomprehensible shoddy foundations of large / long running projects)

venturecruelty10• 8 months ago

Have you ever met a smoker?

ziggure• 8 months ago

I love that the picture in the article is AI-generated

hermitcrab2• 8 months ago

I will not allow AI to be pushed down my throat just to justify your bad investment.

Unfortunately these reckless investments are likely to cause massive collateral damage to us 'little people'. But I'm sure the billionaires will be just fine.

analog31• 8 months ago

One issue might just be money. "Forcing" us to buy new laptops every 3 years has to be planned well enough in advance for the new OS and hardware to be ready, but meanwhile, it may have occurred to a lot of people that hanging onto the old stuff for a few more years might make the most sense right now.

Also, even many home users may be finding that they interact less and less with the "platform" now that everything including MS Office runs from a browser. I can barely remember when the differences between Windows and Linux were even relevant to my personal computer use. This was necessitated by having to find a good way to accommodate Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android all at once.

1970-01-01• 8 months ago

That's an interesting take. We really don't need TPUs and GPUs to run an OS, but that doesn't mean they won't try to sell it to us as a necessity.

anonymouskimmer10• 8 months ago

Yep. My personal laptop is 12 years old and my work laptop is 6. A replacement battery, some extra RAM, and a replacement fan (kind of hard to get) for my personal laptop a few years ago and it still does everything I want it to do.

I cracked the screen on my work laptop last year, but IT set me up with a replacement screen. It's so much nicer having discrete buttons than a clickable trackpad, so I skipped on an upgrade. Still does everything I need it to do for work (including working with Windows 11).

And the vast majority of things I do on either laptop involves a web browser.

jeffbee2• 8 months ago

This article has basically nothing to say, and all of the comments here on HN are just projecting their priors into the vacuum.

mrcsharp7• 8 months ago

It is one more voice against the frantic nature of this topic and the corporations desperate to push for it. It is no different than one more post about Claude.md making it to the front page.

jeffbee2• 8 months ago

It spends no time establishing the facts of franticness and desperation.

winddude• 8 months ago

"But we bought too many GPUs! We spent billions on infrastructure! They have to be put to work!"

right... none of them are saying that. They could probably use more GPUs considering the price of GPUs and memory are skyrocketing and the supply chain can't keep up. It's about experimentation, they need real users and real feedback to know how to improve the current generation of models, and figure out how to monetise them.

seizethecheese6• 8 months ago

The author and more than half of the comments here are hallucinating reasons to be angry about AI. Ironic, really.

venturecruelty10• 8 months ago

Add "patronizing proponents" to the pile.

creata3• 8 months ago

In what universe is having things that you do not want shoved on you an invalid reason to be angry?

hastily31142• 8 months ago

I think the reason AI is being pushed everywhere right now is simply that companies want to experiment with it.

They want to explore what is possible and what sticks with users.

The best way to do this is to just push it in their apps as many places as possible since 1. you get a nice list of real world problems to try and solve. 2. You have more pressure on devs to actually make something that works because it is going into production. 3. You get feedback from millions of users.

Also, by working heavily with their AI, they will discover areas that can be improved and thus make the AI itself better.

They don't care that it is annoying, unhelpful or uneconomical because the purpose is experimentation.

protocolture3• 8 months ago

Most of these companies have an advanced features usergroup. Leave it there until its desired.

stephen_g• 8 months ago

Or they could beta test them first with users who opt in, and work out that most users hate the features there, instead of taking on AI nonsense everywhere and beta testing crappy features nobody wants on real users?

hastily31142• 8 months ago

For the record, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, or that i agree with it. I also find it very annoying.

seizethecheese6• 8 months ago

Right now, the frantic pace of deployment isn't about utility; it's about liquidity. It’s being shoved down our throats because some billionaires need to make some more billions before they die.
We see the hallucinations. We see the errors. Let's pick the things which work and slowly integrate it into our lives. We don't need to do it this quarter just because some startup has to do an earnings call.

Citation needed?

To me this is a contentless rant. AI is about old billionaires getting richer before they die? It’s at least a lot more than that.

Seems like some people tried AI in 2023, got negative affinity for it, then just never update with new information. In my personal use, hallucinations are way down, and it’s just getting more and more useful.

gnarlouse• 8 months ago

Also don’t shove it up our

YmiYugy• 8 months ago

I hear the complaints from the tech giants already: "But we bought too many GPUs! We spent billions on infrastructure! They have to be put to work!"
Not my problem.

I don't know about the author specifically, but the bubble popping is a very bad thing for many people. People keep saying that this bubble isn't so bad because it's concentrated on the balance sheet of very deep pocketed tech companies who can survive the crash. I think that is basically true, but a lot is riding on the stock valuations of these big tech companies and lots of bad stuff will happen when these crash. It's obviously bad for the people holding these stocks, but I these tech stocks are so big that there is a real risk of widespread contagion.

fhrhfhfhdj• 8 months ago

The only thing worse than popping the AI bubble is trying to inflate it even larger with a government bailout. The longer the government tries to protect the bubble, the more extreme and destructive the level of capital misallocation is going to become. They should have popped it years ago before we were trying to build nuclear reactors to keep our internet chatbots from taking down the power grid.

charlesabarnes• 8 months ago

I think the market forces that is supposed to constrain these companies are broken.

Users don't have many other options to switch to. Even if they did, the b2b/advertising revenue they get makes up for any losses they may take on the consumer side.

beefnugs• 8 months ago

They have already proven they absolutely COULD tag everything with evidence of how much came from an original author/artist. Google's image generator has that hidden signature feature that can publicize ai generated, but they don't go the step further back to the real source. Just "it came from ai" aheeyuk pay us

duxup2• 8 months ago

I think the problem is, the folks in charge feel like they don't have a choices.

They spent a ton of money and/or they see everyone's LinkedIn posts or fantastic news stories by someone selling BS and they're afraid to say the emperor has no clothes.

nephihaha2• 8 months ago

All that Zoom and Skype during lockdown was to train AI. Those video calls weren't free.

scdnc• 8 months ago

A tip: degoogle, demicrosoft, defacebook (and maybe also deapple)

Don't push AI down our throats

Related Stories