Everyone pretty much hates it, its just here is one of the few places online where money and stupidity can’t be waved around frantically to hide that.
Everyone pretty much hates it, its just here is one of the few places online where money and stupidity can’t be waved around frantically to hide that.
“Corporate schemes” are where a lot of those local models originate. The current state of the art in local video generation, Wan2.2, was made by Alibaba, one of the world’s largest retailers and e-commerce companies and the fifth-largest AI company. The Llama series of models, which kicked off local LLMs, were made by Meta. Meta also created the PyTorch library for machine learning that vast swaths of open AI projects are built on.
I prefer to use local AI models whenever possible, for various reasons. But I don’t begrudge the existence of companies providing these services. As long as competition can be maintained it’ll likely be a net benefit to the field even if individual products are often closed.
Big companies spending money is not the part we’re talking about. The schemes people hate are where this tech gets shoved into everyone’s face, everywhere, and makes software and websites less reliable. If ChatGPT was still just a website you could go to, by choice, a lot of people would be happier.
I have yet to encounter any of these schemes myself. I’ve encountered places where AI tools were provided, but not where they get “shoved in my face”. I often have to seek them out. Closest I’ve encountered was when Google switched me over to an AI response by default instead of search results, with a popup saying “do you want this, or do you want to go back to regular search results?” I tried the AI out a bit, didn’t like it since I already have chatbots I use when I want a chatbot summary, and then easily found the option to switch back. I could have just clicked “no, back to normal please” when it first switched for the same effect.
I suspect a lot of people are just looking for things to get offended about. They see an option they don’t want to use and then instead of just not using it (like how they’ve long done for other kinds of options they don’t want to use) they get all worked up about it.
It’s getting a little shovey to be fair. The top of most Google results is an AI overview that you can’t opt out of. The top line of WhatsApp is “ask meta AI”. Meta is particularly bad for it, zuck explicitly wants to replace your real life friends with monetizable bots. Those of us working in big corporates are getting rapidly bored of the “assistants” and “copilots” that have nuked our tech budget and populate every app without assisting or copiloting in meaningful ways (and of correcting enthusiastically wrong output of colleagues blithely using LLMs for inappropriate tasks).
Some things it’s possible to just avoid but big tech is pretty pervasive. Tricky to really participate in society without at this point.
My guy - your counterexamples are the fucking examples.
Android telling me ‘hey guess what we’re gonna scan your messages and constantly offer to pretend to be you’ almost had me snap my phone in half. And I like this technology. I am a routine defender of the concept, on Lemmy. But the skeeze factor on these forced constant additions you seem to view as gentle are giving people the creeps. Justifiably so.
Right, and I’m saying my examples are extremely weaksauce when it comes to things being “shoved in someone’s face.”
I have an Android phone and I haven’t had anything like what you’re describing happen. It could be that there was some popup on update that said “hey there’s this new feature” and I said “no” and I have now forgotten about it because it was a trivial, routine sort of thing that happens whenever there’s an update - there’s usually some kind of new feature it’ll tell me about. If it didn’t tell me about them I’d never know about them, so I’m fine with that.
Being inured to the shit these companies keep pulling is not disproof that they keep pulling shit. You’re just shrugging about the awful scenario because they still let you opt out… sometimes. They didn’t stop training on your private fucking messages, just because you never click the cluster-of-stars button. There’s maybe a checkbox for that, buried deep in the settings, in a file cabinet labeled “beward the leopard.” They might even honor it! But you can’t really stop them, any more than you can revert to the versions of search engines that worked, five years ago.
What do you think people are talking about, if not the bullshit you blithely weather? Bing’s not gonna put a gun to someone’s head and tell them to render a video. But millions of people every day (okay well it’s Bing) thousands of people every day are pestered about some bullshit capability. Getting cajoled is bad, actually. It’s unpleasant. Especially when people wind up trying it, and it’s… okay, at best. And then they get the same come-ons for the same bullshit, for every goddamn website people actually use. Gmail wants to know if you’re interested in AI. Facebook wants to know if you’re interested-- Twitter wants to know-- Google Search-- your own goddamn phone starts hassling you about this, and people go from tired of it to angry at it.
Justifiably so.
No, I’m shrugging about it because it really isn’t that big a deal. What I’ve experienced in no way merits the term “shoved in my face,” in my opinion. I consider that to be hyperbole.
See, this is the opposite of it being “shoved in my face”. It’s something I don’t even see.
Whether it’s good or bad is a separate issue, I’m just addressing the term “shoved in my face.”
I think a lot of people have a fundamental hate on for AI in general, and so they’re magnifying small inconveniences into enormous deals that they can more easily complain about. It’s a common feature of the human psyche to pay more attention to things that bother you and overestimate their prevalence as a result.
I’m not saying people should like AI, they can think whatever they want about it. But when they start ranting about how AI is constantly pestering them and there doesn’t appear to be evidence that that’s actually the case I start to question the rational basis for their position.
A few days back Firefox added a shortcut to query the Perplexity AI to their list of various search engine shortcuts. The /r/firefox subreddit was full of apoplectic rage from people who clearly had not actually seen it and had no idea what it actually meant, because it was a complete nothingburger. It added an icon to a dropdown that few people ever open and that if it really bothers you can be removed with two clicks. That’s the sort of reaction that bothers me, it’s impossible to have a rational position on AI for or against with that sort of discourse going on.
If you want a real example of something being “shoved in your face”, people still to this day make memes about WinRAR’s “your trial period is ending, please pay for the full version” popup.
A lot of people’s threshold differ from yours. You’re just filtering out a wide swath of shit that people vocally detest.
People’s hate-on for AI developed because this shit happened to them! The fact you don’t see it as a big deal does not change other people’s experience. You can internalize how the average person takes to being prodded, in this way - or you can live in denial of it. But nothing you say will change how they felt.
Companies know this, companies measure this, and they don’t fucking care. They keep doing shit that “bothers” people, in the sense that a million strangers shared the same moment of revulsion because an object they rely upon cheerfully announced it was sprinkling some fresh hell into yet another interaction.
This denial feels deeply similar to Windows fanboys defending forced updates. They didn’t mind clicking the button that makes their computer useless for an hour and then work differently forever, so what could you possibly want differently?
If that’s really the threshold of rage for most people we’d have never survived the invention of the automobile.