4 ms·

ChatGPT is the 5th most-visited website on the planet and growing quickly. that’s one of many popular products. Hardly call that unwilling. I bet only something

ChatGPT is the 5th most-visited website on the planet and growing quickly. that’s one of many popular products. Hardly call that unwilling. I bet only something like 8% of Instagram users say they would pay for it. Are we to take this to mean that Instagram is an unpopular product that is rbi g forced on an unwilling public?

esperent 1y ago
I downloaded a Quordle game on Android yesterday. It pushes you to buy a premium subscription, and you know what that gets you? AI chat inside the game. I'm not unwilling to use AI in places where I choose. But let's not pretend that just because people do use it in one place, they are willing to have it shoved upon them in every other place.
archargelod 1y ago
If I want to use ChatGPT I will go and use ChatGPT myself without a middleman. I don't need every app and website to have it's own magical chat interface that is slow, undiscoverable and makes the stuff up half the time.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  I actually quite like the AI-for-search use case. I can't load all of a company's support documents and manuals into ChatGPT easily; if they've done that for me, great! I was searching for something on Omnissa Horizon here: https://docs.omnissa.com/ https://docs.omnissa.com/ It has some kind of ChatGPT integration, and I tried it and it found the answer I was looking for straight away, after 10 minutes of googling and manual searching had failed. Seems to be not working at the moment though :-/
kemotep 1y ago
Would you like your Facebook feed or Twitter or even Hacker News feed inserted in between your work emails or while you are shopping for clothes on a completely different website? If you answer no, does that make you an unwilling user of social media? It’s the most visited sites in the world after all, how could randomly injecting it into your GPS navigation system be a poor fit?
satyrun 1y ago
My 75 year old father uses Claude instead of google now for basically any search function. All the anti-AI people I know are in their 30s. I think there are many in this age group that got use to nothing changing and are wishing it to stay that way.
- Paradigma11 1y ago
  A friend of mine is a 65 years old philosopher who uses it to translate ancient greek texts or generate arguments between specific philosophers.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  I know plenty of anti-AI people who are older and younger than their 30s.
- croes 1y ago
  Isn’t it fascinating how all of a sudden we swap energy saving and data protection for convenience. We won’t solve climate change but we will have elaborate essays why we failed.
  - DangitBobby 1y ago
    I think for the majority of the population, solving climate change is a non-goal. Even people who ostensibly care about it aren't willing to sacrifice anything for it.
    - goatlover 1y ago
      How long will that remain true though? The effects of climate change will only get worse.
      - ben_w 1y ago
        Even when it's a goal, it's one that only works with a collective action and vanishingly few defectors; and the more defectors, the easier it becomes to tell oneself a narrative that ones own actions don't matter because those defectors have already broken it anyway. Personally, I'm still optimistic, at least for the emissions due to primary energy, because renewables and storage are just so ridiculously cheap now. Unfortunately, all the other emissions are still enough that prisoner's dilemma type defection still comes into play. But I'm hopeful for cement, and have good reason to expect electrolytic reduction of metal oxides (beyond just aluminium) to become viable soon, as the primary energy is made increasingly renewable and cheap.
nonplus 1y ago
I do think Facebook and Instagram are forced on the public if they want to fully interact with their peers. I just don't participate in discussions about Facebook marketplace links friends share, or Instagram reels my D&D groups post. So in a sense I agree with you, forcing AI into products is similar to forcing advertising into products.
anon7000 1y ago
Agreed. My mother and aunts are using ChatGPT all the time. It has really massive market penetration in a way I (a software engineer and AI skeptic/“realist”) didn’t realize. Now, do they care about meta’s AI? Idk, but they’re definitely using AI a lot
croes 1y ago
It’s popular by scammers too. I wonder how many uses of Chatgpt and such are malicious.
svantana 1y ago
The post is not about ChatGPT (and its like), it's about "AI" being forced into services that have been working just fine without AI for a long time.
nitwit005 1y ago
People want these features as much as they wanted Cortana on Windows. Which is to say, there's already a history of AI features failing at a number of these larger companies. The public truly is frequently rejecting them.

esperent 1y ago

I downloaded a Quordle game on Android yesterday. It pushes you to buy a premium subscription, and you know what that gets you? AI chat inside the game. I'm not unwilling to use AI in places where I choose. But let's not pretend that just because people do use it in one place, they are willing to have it shoved upon them in every other place.

archargelod 1y ago

If I want to use ChatGPT I will go and use ChatGPT myself without a middleman. I don't need every app and website to have it's own magical chat interface that is slow, undiscoverable and makes the stuff up half the time.

IshKebab 1y ago
I actually quite like the AI-for-search use case. I can't load all of a company's support documents and manuals into ChatGPT easily; if they've done that for me, great! I was searching for something on Omnissa Horizon here: https://docs.omnissa.com/ https://docs.omnissa.com/ It has some kind of ChatGPT integration, and I tried it and it found the answer I was looking for straight away, after 10 minutes of googling and manual searching had failed. Seems to be not working at the moment though :-/

kemotep 1y ago

Would you like your Facebook feed or Twitter or even Hacker News feed inserted in between your work emails or while you are shopping for clothes on a completely different website? If you answer no, does that make you an unwilling user of social media? It’s the most visited sites in the world after all, how could randomly injecting it into your GPS navigation system be a poor fit?

satyrun 1y ago

My 75 year old father uses Claude instead of google now for basically any search function. All the anti-AI people I know are in their 30s. I think there are many in this age group that got use to nothing changing and are wishing it to stay that way.

Paradigma11 1y ago
A friend of mine is a 65 years old philosopher who uses it to translate ancient greek texts or generate arguments between specific philosophers.
suddenlybananas 1y ago
I know plenty of anti-AI people who are older and younger than their 30s.
croes 1y ago
Isn’t it fascinating how all of a sudden we swap energy saving and data protection for convenience. We won’t solve climate change but we will have elaborate essays why we failed.
- DangitBobby 1y ago
  I think for the majority of the population, solving climate change is a non-goal. Even people who ostensibly care about it aren't willing to sacrifice anything for it.
  - goatlover 1y ago
    How long will that remain true though? The effects of climate change will only get worse.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      Even when it's a goal, it's one that only works with a collective action and vanishingly few defectors; and the more defectors, the easier it becomes to tell oneself a narrative that ones own actions don't matter because those defectors have already broken it anyway. Personally, I'm still optimistic, at least for the emissions due to primary energy, because renewables and storage are just so ridiculously cheap now. Unfortunately, all the other emissions are still enough that prisoner's dilemma type defection still comes into play. But I'm hopeful for cement, and have good reason to expect electrolytic reduction of metal oxides (beyond just aluminium) to become viable soon, as the primary energy is made increasingly renewable and cheap.

nonplus 1y ago

I do think Facebook and Instagram are forced on the public if they want to fully interact with their peers. I just don't participate in discussions about Facebook marketplace links friends share, or Instagram reels my D&D groups post. So in a sense I agree with you, forcing AI into products is similar to forcing advertising into products.

anon7000 1y ago

Agreed. My mother and aunts are using ChatGPT all the time. It has really massive market penetration in a way I (a software engineer and AI skeptic/“realist”) didn’t realize. Now, do they care about meta’s AI? Idk, but they’re definitely using AI a lot

croes 1y ago

It’s popular by scammers too. I wonder how many uses of Chatgpt and such are malicious.

svantana 1y ago

The post is not about ChatGPT (and its like), it's about "AI" being forced into services that have been working just fine without AI for a long time.

nitwit005 1y ago

People want these features as much as they wanted Cortana on Windows. Which is to say, there's already a history of AI features failing at a number of these larger companies. The public truly is frequently rejecting them.