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My biggest frustration is that these widgets keep wiggling the UI. Lots of the JS side logic has this issue but, the latency on the AI widget that loads and then reflows my UI and move what I was just about to click on! Then a mis-click that is a rabbit hole

> Forums and communities are losing authentic voices... The comments under most tweets follow the same robotic tone, and it's obvious that a lot of them exist only to farm engagement.

AI isn't making it better, but tbh most of the author's complaints have been a problem since well before LLMs. Engagement bait is profitable, and an internet that connects 8 billion people will always trend toward monoculture.

I loathe the loss of human customer service and moderation (of social media, online gaming, etc) to AI. I constantly hear reports of AI misidentifying speech in in-game chat that results in people getting banned. As well as getting randomly banned/flagged on social media for "community guidelines" or some other esoteric nonsense.

Then, of course, when you attempt to contact said company's customer service, there is none to be had. Only chat bots that not only cannot solve your issue, but can give you inaccurate information. So, what do you do then? There's nothing to be done, you're stuck in an indefinite limbo of customer service purgatory, only being able to guess at what to do.

I, myself, was banned off Instagram. I had a private account, so all I did was view other people's posts and occasionally left comments on their posts, never anything obnoxious or rude. Out of the blue, I received an email telling me my account was suspended and I needed to verify myself by giving them my phone number to get an SMS, check a reCAPTCHA box, and send a selfie to show I was human. I did that and it said I would be unsuspended within an hour, but I got an email stating "We reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Standards. As a result, your account has been permanently disabled."

Of course, there's no one to follow up with and I'm left racking my brain trying to figure out what I could have done to cause this. Did I reply to someone inappropriately? Was it because I was using a VPN? What could I have possibly done?

We've seen that some people who have been banned on social media find that, essentially the only way to get unbanned was to know someone at Meta [1] or get your story published in the media to get their attention [2] or even resort to SLEEPING with Meta employee(s) to get your account issues resolved [3].

Alternately, some Meta employees have turned unbanning people into a side gig [4] [5] as they know that there is no legitimate way to get your account back. When I inquired about this on Reddit, I was pointed to a site that showed offers of resolution to these problems cost in the $1000-5000 range.

It has gotten to a point that the use of AI has turned life into a literal Kafkaesque nightmare. How soon will AI take the place of customer service for actual necessary services like calling your local DMV to make an appointment or even taking over 911 services? The promises made by AI companies about this software making our lives easier has merely become a drive to implement AI into every possible facet of life, not to benefit anyone, but to drive up profits.

This is rent seeking* by it's purest definition.

* [Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[1] When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of “Content Jail” https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way...

[2] Meta suspended his business's social accounts — it took him a month to reach a human https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/funktasy-meta-ban-9.6932525

[3] OnlyFans Star Says She Slept With Meta Employees to Get Instagram Unbanned https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...

[4] Inside job: When an account gets hacked, social media giant Meta offers little support, spawning a shadowy network of brokers and Meta employees who profit from helping users get back online https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...

[5] Meta reportedly punished dozens of employees for offering an inside line to account recovery https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23464297/meta-allegedly-...

I changed my home setup to MX Linux a couple of months ago.

The PC is so damn snappy compared to Win10 with all the garbage updates. I don’t want widgets on my Lock Screen. I don’t want to know about Candy Crush when I open the Start Menu. And I definitely do not want to use Edge, Firefox is fine thanks. Let alone the AI BS set for Win11.

I generally agree with the sentiments of the author when it comes to AI being shoved down everyone’s throat. When I don’t directly seek out AI intervention on a problem, I generally find that some form of it is in my way, slowing me down, and giving me incorrect information. I am often able to avoid it on my own systems, but whenever I need to interact with a company in some way, I am almost guaranteed to have to deal with their clanker in some form and then, if I am lucky, I get to repeat the same information to a human. As it exists right now, it significantly slows down many simply tasks.

My nest to Google Home got "updated". I just to ask hey google what is the thermostat set to and it would tell me 70-whatever degrees. Now after the update it tells me it is set to cool. Not that helpful, I have to ask, hey google what temperature is the thermostat set to, which is longer and I find annoying specific

> > Forums and communities are losing authentic voices... The comments under most tweets follow the same robotic tone, and it's obvious that a lot of them exist only to farm engagement.

I've mentioned this before, but I still think that part of the reason Something Awful was and is still fun really boils down to the fact that it cost money to join. It's not a lot of money, but enough to where it keeps bot traffic pretty low (since it would quickly get expensive to keep buying accounts as they get banned). This, in combination with the fact that there's not really a huge benefit to getting engagement other than "it's fun to be funny", and the moderators willingness to ban/probe people who make the forum un-fun, and it's become basically the only social media that I use.

I'm not quite a total boomer, I do understand the appeal of social networks like Twitter or Instagram, but I kind of think that ML recommendation systems are sort of by definition antithetical to anything good. It's not like anything a YouTube or TikTok recommendation gives me is going to meaningfully improve my life, and if these systems work as intended then all they do is make me waste more time than I would normally.

The psychology profiles they are generating on us scare me tremendously.

As an extreme believer in AI (to the point of being a doomer and expecting+fearing ASI) I have to agree with this wholeheartedly.

We have to be careful to avoid blaming AI as a technology for the incredibly hamfisted way it’s being implemented in most products, and affecting online spaces.

Maybe there will be a bubble burst. That doesn’t mean AI won’t eventually transform the world.

It’s hard to believe in nuance but also very important.

I'm drowning in annoying popup "We noticed that ads aren't being displayed." I never asked for and I hate it.

While I agree with the author, I don’t find it nearly as difficult to escape AI.

AI on the iPhone is basically a global toggle, one switch turns it all off.

The author used a weird third party browser but if they were just using Firefox or Chrome there really wouldn’t be any AI that couldn’t be turned off/ignored.

Same deal with Windows, there’s no AI features doing anything on my windows 11 PC. Everything on offer has a toggle or uninstall option and the level of nag is far less than the Windows 10 OneDrive days.

The main thing you can’t escape is AI making the internet worse. Then again I do find AI searching to often be way more useful than the pre-AI search that’s clogged with results that don’t match the meaning of what you’re asking for and SEO spam that AI queries can more easily defeat.

AI (checks list)

Yep, another greed machine that nobody wanted, driven by a wealthy minority and (checks notes) yet again dressed up as the savior of humankind.

Let’s see here.. above SaaS and below Insistence That Green Energy Is A Scam.

On the first section, this is sort of funny. This guy is complaining about Android and Windows. Meanwhile, Mark Gurman is reporting every week how behind Apple is on their LLM integration. So here I am on iOS and macOS and I don't have any of these problems because Apple can't get their shit together to mess up my experience.

How many times can we read the same article and have the same discussion? If AI is not useful, people will not use the product or feature and it will die. If it is useful, people will use it.

On the Target web site tonight I was looking at a monitor stand and the Q&A section has some questions written and answered by Target's AI so as to seed the section with content.

One of the AI questions is, "What is the weight capacity of the monitor stand?" and the answer is, "The monitor stand is designed to support and elevate a computer monitor, ensuring stability."

What are we even doing here? Will anyone ever be accountable for all this stupidity that all of us see every day?

Someone's getting promoted out of it and the investment money loves it. So it doesn't matter.

The hype outpaces the actual value in many cases and that's why we get the shit we get.

A good example are YouTube's unavoidable auto translations. No one bilingual user wants that. It would be extremely easy to make it optional but it won't boost the numbers of the BS metric being pushed internally.

Hot take: it’s not just “me too! Valuation pls”.

Tokens are fine grained billable attribute that lets you add micro transactions to your service.

Not in all cases, but in many we exist in a complicated world of enshitifcation + inflation.

Inflation means you need to somehow make more money.

You can either: raise prices (unpopular), make your product cheaper (unpopular) or add new features and rise the price on the basis of “new value!”.

You see major organisations doing this: same product, but now with ai! …and it’s more expensive. Or it’s a mandatory bundle. Or it’s “premium”.

Long storm short, a lot of companies see the way that cloud providers do billing (usage based billing, no caps, you get the bill after using it) as the ideal end state.

Token based billing moves towards that world; which isn’t just “profit!” …it’s companies trying to deal with the reality of a complicated market place that will punish them for raising prices.

…and it is bad. I’m just saying that it’s kind of naive to think so many companies are doing this just as a “me tooooo!”. Come on; even if you’re hunting a funding round, the people running these companies are (mostly) not complete idiots.

No one is adding AI features because it’s fun, or they’re bored.

…

…ok, there are some idiots. Most people have a bigger vision for these features than just annoying their users.

Google finance recently added an AI search box to the bottom of the page. If you accidentally scroll up from there bottom of the screen it opens an annoying AI summary of current events. If I ask the search bar how to remove the search bar it unsurprisingly has technical difficulties and doesn't answer.

Yes. Generative AI is bad. Most of the general population already realizes it. Only the tech and computer science bubble remains optimistic.

I managed to get things done without AI and now I find myself more worried about making sure the AI doesn't f** up the thing I'm trying to do. I half suspect that most people who claim to be successful with AI are just getting something that sort of works and then saying "I meant to do that!"

Position brought in to do "AI transformation" needs to deliver, and they have no way other than keep shoving it harder and harder.

It's so much worse with decade old brands as most of us cant just not use it, and these min-maxxer AI people are definitely taking advantages of it.

I don't know where you guys are seeing all this AI stuff. I feel like you're going out of your way to complain about new features. Just don't fuckin use it. Even Facebook, Snapchat, insta etc, it's not in your face. You have to be very intentional to use and find it.

Edit: even on my PIXEL phone, I honestly don't know how to pull up Gemini. I also think it's ironic that on a forum for companies who are sucking on the AI teet that y'all are complaining about the world you created.

Lol awwww, AI bros are mad.

How long did it take to get the OS-level settings for reduced motion and preferred theme (light/dark) which provide hints to apps?

Is there time for a new "user isn't interested in your shitty AI^wLLM features" one before the bubble bursts?

Cram it in everything, make a press release for the stockholders, and see what sticks.

Microsoft is a particularly bad offender with copilot nonsense popping up all over the place. But hoo boy look at that stock price

This article is like people in the early days of GUIs complaining that graphical interfaces make using a computer so much slower versus just typing the right command in console right away. That was true at first… until it wasn’t. AI is still in its infancy and a lot of the noise discussed in the article is real. But it will eventually create an Internet/OS interface we can barely fathom. Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.

> At this point, AI isn't even about improving products anymore. It's a marketing checkbox companies use to convince shareholders they're staying ahead in this artificial race. Whether it's a feature nobody asked for or a chatbot no one uses, it's all about being able to say "we have AI too."

And every company's website is now about "AI", whether they're actually doing anything with LLMs or not. They might be using the same SVM they've been using for the past 10 years, but now their business is "AI-driven".

I hate AI as much as the next guy but to pretend that Google assistant was in any way better than Gemini is insane. I went for 10 years giving the assistant a try every time I got a new phone and it always straight up sucked. Forgot the exact name of the lamp? Good luck, I'm not changing its color. Wanna hold a conversation that isn't just "tell a joke"? Forget it. Asking it to convert one measurement into another was also a complete lottery.

Gemini is a lot better at it, and while yes, it makes typical LLM mistakes, I can't wait for the day when we're able to use a locally running model for it.

Yeah and every freaking Github repo suggestion the Android news algorithm makes on my phone is to agent/AI crap. I don't care about that. Show me data structures repos and stuff. I want to see cool things, not more AI slop producers.

I will grudgingly admit that some AI features I encounter are kind of useful.

At work, we of course are all-in on a large wiki (Confluence). It has a feature irritatingly overlayed that treats searches as AI questions the provided LLM will answer. I have to admit it often does a good job answering my effective question directly, vs me going through many semi-related pages trying to find out how to do something.

Ours is a Windows shop, and I find I am using Copilot somewhat more frequently instead of web searches to find answers to "how do I ..." questions related to the commercial tools we use. While the responses are not always perfect, they are often-enough accurate enough to be useful. And, it saves me a lot of time vs digging through, ironically enough, AI-generated slop pages of how to's that take ten feet of page to answer a simple damned question.

People will not get true benefits of these technologies until they own the hardware that the LLMS and its other various systems run on. Also until they are the ones to actually build the AI system or at the least had a community verify it thoroughly. Corporations are only interested in monetizing their products swaying the public and reducing litigation. You will not get a useful AI system from them, you will get corporate slop that is lobotomized and is neutered in every useful way. That's why I started working on my own fully uncensored no bullshit AI system that has the ability to use other AI systems. The regular folk will be in a HUGE disadvantage using the corporate owned AI systems compared to people who have fully capable systems that are not restricted in any of their intellectual thought traces or abilities. If you don't want to be the one left behind I strongly recommend you start thinking on how to either build such a system yourself or get something like that from an open source project.

Remind me in 5 years. AI tools don’t hide the fact that the output needs to improve. Calling out the obvious problems is a lazy take.

This is one of those areas that validate the use of a meme to halt any further discussion until something changes:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1404116417142065/posts/15882...

It's not that I hate all AI, I think it has a lot of great use cases - none of which justify unilaterally imposing it on everyone.