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.
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.
The car, a famously uncontroversial invention. Never killed anyone, poisoned anything, or changed any climate.
What you’re doing here is tantamount to telling early hit-and-run victims ‘I woulda just dodged. How hard is it to move out the way?’
These are 800-pound gorillas dictating the fine details of how you experience modern life. They do A/B testing for whether Save goes before or after Cancel, to optimize some desired metric. And every god damn one of them has put this in front of people’s eyeballs, as often as they’ll tolerate, or worse. Do you think candy in the checkout aisle is there for your benefit?
I think you’ve completely missed the point. I was making an analogy to road rage. Drivers face many irritations while on the road and very few of them lose their minds over it.
Neat.
These are still 800-pound gorillas dictating the fine details of how you experience modern life. They do A/B testing for whether Save goes before or after Cancel, to optimize some desired metric. And every god damn one of them has put this in front of people’s eyeballs, as often as they’ll tolerate, or worse. Do you think candy in the checkout aisle is there for your benefit?
I am not bothered by candy in the checkout aisle. I just walk by it and don’t buy it. It’s not “in my face.”
If they’re doing such careful testing then don’t you think they’d notice if their “shoving” was causing significant numbers of users to rage-quit?
Oh sure, because unless you quit Google forever, you can’t possibly be pissed off about some new bullshit. If you’ll tolerate abuse then it’s not real.
We agree about the underlying tech - which is why it’s baffling that you’d deny people had a bad reaction to this rollout. No amount of ‘well they shouldn’t!’ will change that they did. Predictably, repeatedly, and in my opinion justifiably. If explaining why, at length and in detail, just sees glib variations on ‘but but but they shouldn’t,’ why do you bother to speak? What do you hope to accomplish, through words? You won’t change how millions felt. I think you’re wrong to expect they should shut up and take it.
That /r/firefox thread I mentioned earlier was full of people claiming they were rage-quitting Firefox forever and storming off to various other browsers.
I’m not denying that some people have a bad reaction to the rollout, I’m saying I don’t believe the explanation they’re giving for why they’re having a bad reaction. I think they’re flipping out over the mere existence of AI, and are making excuses to justify that reaction.
And I also don’t believe that “millions” feel this. This loops right back to the root of this whole comment thread; these social media bubbles we’re in here give a skewed view of what the general population’s feeling on this stuff is.