8 ms·

Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to

by cs702 1y ago

Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Amazon—but I don’t get a choice."

brookst 1y ago
It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled. If you don’t like something, don’t buy it. If you find the presence of some products offensive in a marketplace, don’t shop there. Spotify is not a human right.
- fnordpiglet 1y ago
  I actually use the AI books that litter kindle unlimited to teach my daughter how to differentiate and be more sophisticated. I think a feature of all this is it inculcates a lot of people to AI spew. If it were isolated to the elite and the unscrupulous alone people would be a lot more vulnerable. By saturating the world with it, people get a true choice by being able to recognize it when they see it and avoid the output. It’s not like all our surfaces are not covered in enshittification as it is, another dose of it won’t make it meaningfully worse. And I know a lot of non English speakers that really appreciate the AI writing assistants built into email, the ai summaries built into search. Assuming no one finds them beneficial because it litters an already littered experience is a bit close minded. Many people otherwise challenged in some way. Summaries help dyslexics get through otherwise intractable walls of text, multi modal glasses help the vision impaired, witting assistants help bilingual workers level the playing field. Just because these don’t apply to you doesn’t mean it’s bothersome. (Now should you be able to disable it? Maybe, but as the author points out that’s a product choice made for financial reasons and there’s a market of products that make a different choice - don’t like google? Don’t feel so entitled that every service be free and pay for kagi) Probably no one enjoys AI books though. I did my best at devils advocate on that above.
  - t0bia_s 1y ago
    - Summaries help dyslexics get through otherwise intractable walls of text. Politicians often use AI to summarise proposals and amendments to the laws. And later vote based on those summaries. It's incredible how artifical bureaucracy is driven by artifical intelligence. And how citizens don't care to follow artificial laws that ruins humanity.
- ikr678 1y ago
  For consumer pproducts, sure, don't buy them. For people in office based careers, they may not get a choice when their company rolls out copilot, or management decide to buy an ai helpdesk agent, or a vendor pushes ai slop into the next enterprise software version.
  - brookst 1y ago
    How is that different from not liking other technology choices one’s employer makes? I could write a book about how much I hate our expense tool. But it’s never occurred to me that I am entitled to have a different one.
    - NilMostChill 1y ago
      Entitled, probably not, able to communicate frustrations and suggest alternative options, absolutely.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      You should consider that yes, maybe you are entitled to a better one
- mafuy 1y ago
  AI shit is usually not advertising as such. It's made to look like it was made a human. So I would have to consider this product carefully beforehand, or to return it after buying. That's a hassle. I don't want to spend productive time on this nonsense. For all I care, say it hurts the GDP.
- roxolotl 1y ago
  The Onion has a great response to this from 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.
  - cs702 1y ago
    ROFL. Thank you for sharing that link!
  - AstroBen 1y ago
    If these things are genuinely so universally hated won't they just be.. capitalism'd out of existence? People will stop engaging with them and better products will win What book store will stock AI slop that no-one wants to buy?
    - rincebrain 1y ago
      Part of the problem is that some of these services have enormous upfront costs to work at all. It's fun to say "let's go write a complete replacement for Microsoft Office" or the Adobe suite or what have you, but that has a truly astonishing upfront cost to get to a point where it's even servicing 50% of the use cases, let alone 95 or 99%. Or there's other examples where it's not obvious there's sufficient interest to finance an alternative - how many people are going to pay for something that replicates solely the old functionality of Microsoft Paint or Notepad, for example.
      - AstroBen 1y ago
        What would happen if Microsoft Office started to charge $250/mo tomorrow? My guess is you'd very quickly get a bunch of teams scrambling to produce something to compete and capture a huge market by charging a tenth the price. Funding is taken care of when winning there is worth so much Maybe it won't happen overnight because they're huge software suites.. but it will happen. We need regulations to take care of anti-competitive practices - but after that the market seems to work pretty well for keeping companies in check
- prng2021 1y ago
  How is this hard to understand? You’re completely missing the point. You’re basically saying if you get a spam text, don’t read it. If you get spam email, don’t read it. If you see an ad modal popup on a website, close it. It’s all still super annoying just like these AI features screaming “use me! click me! type to me!” all over the place in the UI.
  - brookst 1y ago
    There is a huge difference between unwanted messages and a commercial service changing their offering in ways you don’t like. It is literally the definition of entitlement to conflate the two.
- cs702 1y ago
  > If you don’t like something, don’t buy it. The OP's point is that increasingly, we don't have that choice, for example, because AI slop masquerades as if it were authored by human beings (that's, in fact, its purpose!), or because the software applications you rely on suddenly start pushing "AI companions" on you, whether you want them or not, or because you have no viable alternatives to the software applications you use, so you must put up with those "AI companions," whether you want them in your life or not.
- computerthings 1y ago
  [dead]
- babymetal 1y ago
  I'm a bookseller who often uses Ingram to buy books wholesale when I'm not buying direct from publishers. I've used them for their distribution service since opening 5 years ago because they are the only folks in town who can help bootstrap a very small business with coverage of all the major publishers (in the U.S.). They're great at that, for a small cut in revenue. Six-plus months ago they put a chatbot in the bottom right corner of their website that literally covers up buttons I use all the time for ordering, so that I have to scroll now in order to access those controls (Chrome, MacOS). After testing it with various queries it only seems to provide answers to questions in their pre-existing support documentation. This is not about choice (see above, they are the only game in town), and it is not about entitlement (we're a tiny shop trying to serve our customers' often obscure book requests). They seemed to literally place the chatbot buttons onto their website with no polling of their users. This is an anecdotal report about Ingram specifically.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Is it specific to AI or have they made other bad UI choices over the years?
    - babymetal 1y ago
      Very recently their "advanced search" page was redone with a totally different and slightly more modern styling (prior to addition of the chat expert overlaid in the corner). The rest of Ingram's ordering site is still the same as five years ago and is clearly older than that. That's objective; subjectively, it feels like there are individuals who were given the ability to "try new stuff" and "break things" who chose to follow the hype around features that look like this. The chat button seems to me to be an exercise in following-the-herd which actually sucks for me as a user with it blocking my old buttons.
- xdennis 1y ago
  > I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores It's ridiculous to compare bad human books with bad AI books because there many human books which are life-changing, but there isn't a single AI book which isn't trash.
- arexxbifs 1y ago
  Opting out is easy, we can just stop using products from Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Google. Of course, for many that also means opting out of their job, which is a great way to opt out of a home, a family, healthcare, dental care and luxuries like food. I don't think it's entitlement to make a well-mannered complaint about how little choice we actually have when it comes to the whims of the tech giants.
- conartist6 1y ago
  Did you even read the post? The whole point is that "just don't buy it" as a strategy doesn't work anymore for consumers to guide the market when the companies have employed the rock-for-dessert gambit to avoid having to try to sell their products on their merits.
- jmull 1y ago
  You really think we should all either happily accept AI-generated emails or opt out of having an email address at all?
amelius 1y ago
There are plenty of non AI books on Amazon.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  Yes. But you can't tell which is which unless you cut off the data of writing at the release date of ChatGPT.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

by cs702 1y ago

brookst 1y ago

It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled. If you don’t like something, don’t buy it. If you find the presence of some products offensive in a marketplace, don’t shop there. Spotify is not a human right.

fnordpiglet 1y ago
I actually use the AI books that litter kindle unlimited to teach my daughter how to differentiate and be more sophisticated. I think a feature of all this is it inculcates a lot of people to AI spew. If it were isolated to the elite and the unscrupulous alone people would be a lot more vulnerable. By saturating the world with it, people get a true choice by being able to recognize it when they see it and avoid the output. It’s not like all our surfaces are not covered in enshittification as it is, another dose of it won’t make it meaningfully worse. And I know a lot of non English speakers that really appreciate the AI writing assistants built into email, the ai summaries built into search. Assuming no one finds them beneficial because it litters an already littered experience is a bit close minded. Many people otherwise challenged in some way. Summaries help dyslexics get through otherwise intractable walls of text, multi modal glasses help the vision impaired, witting assistants help bilingual workers level the playing field. Just because these don’t apply to you doesn’t mean it’s bothersome. (Now should you be able to disable it? Maybe, but as the author points out that’s a product choice made for financial reasons and there’s a market of products that make a different choice - don’t like google? Don’t feel so entitled that every service be free and pay for kagi) Probably no one enjoys AI books though. I did my best at devils advocate on that above.
- t0bia_s 1y ago
  - Summaries help dyslexics get through otherwise intractable walls of text. Politicians often use AI to summarise proposals and amendments to the laws. And later vote based on those summaries. It's incredible how artifical bureaucracy is driven by artifical intelligence. And how citizens don't care to follow artificial laws that ruins humanity.
ikr678 1y ago
For consumer pproducts, sure, don't buy them. For people in office based careers, they may not get a choice when their company rolls out copilot, or management decide to buy an ai helpdesk agent, or a vendor pushes ai slop into the next enterprise software version.
- brookst 1y ago
  How is that different from not liking other technology choices one’s employer makes? I could write a book about how much I hate our expense tool. But it’s never occurred to me that I am entitled to have a different one.
  - NilMostChill 1y ago
    Entitled, probably not, able to communicate frustrations and suggest alternative options, absolutely.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    You should consider that yes, maybe you are entitled to a better one
mafuy 1y ago
AI shit is usually not advertising as such. It's made to look like it was made a human. So I would have to consider this product carefully beforehand, or to return it after buying. That's a hassle. I don't want to spend productive time on this nonsense. For all I care, say it hurts the GDP.
roxolotl 1y ago
The Onion has a great response to this from 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.
- cs702 1y ago
  ROFL. Thank you for sharing that link!
- AstroBen 1y ago
  If these things are genuinely so universally hated won't they just be.. capitalism'd out of existence? People will stop engaging with them and better products will win What book store will stock AI slop that no-one wants to buy?
  - rincebrain 1y ago
    Part of the problem is that some of these services have enormous upfront costs to work at all. It's fun to say "let's go write a complete replacement for Microsoft Office" or the Adobe suite or what have you, but that has a truly astonishing upfront cost to get to a point where it's even servicing 50% of the use cases, let alone 95 or 99%. Or there's other examples where it's not obvious there's sufficient interest to finance an alternative - how many people are going to pay for something that replicates solely the old functionality of Microsoft Paint or Notepad, for example.
    - AstroBen 1y ago
      What would happen if Microsoft Office started to charge $250/mo tomorrow? My guess is you'd very quickly get a bunch of teams scrambling to produce something to compete and capture a huge market by charging a tenth the price. Funding is taken care of when winning there is worth so much Maybe it won't happen overnight because they're huge software suites.. but it will happen. We need regulations to take care of anti-competitive practices - but after that the market seems to work pretty well for keeping companies in check
prng2021 1y ago
How is this hard to understand? You’re completely missing the point. You’re basically saying if you get a spam text, don’t read it. If you get spam email, don’t read it. If you see an ad modal popup on a website, close it. It’s all still super annoying just like these AI features screaming “use me! click me! type to me!” all over the place in the UI.
- brookst 1y ago
  There is a huge difference between unwanted messages and a commercial service changing their offering in ways you don’t like. It is literally the definition of entitlement to conflate the two.
cs702 1y ago
> If you don’t like something, don’t buy it. The OP's point is that increasingly, we don't have that choice, for example, because AI slop masquerades as if it were authored by human beings (that's, in fact, its purpose!), or because the software applications you rely on suddenly start pushing "AI companions" on you, whether you want them or not, or because you have no viable alternatives to the software applications you use, so you must put up with those "AI companions," whether you want them in your life or not.
computerthings 1y ago
[dead]
babymetal 1y ago
I'm a bookseller who often uses Ingram to buy books wholesale when I'm not buying direct from publishers. I've used them for their distribution service since opening 5 years ago because they are the only folks in town who can help bootstrap a very small business with coverage of all the major publishers (in the U.S.). They're great at that, for a small cut in revenue. Six-plus months ago they put a chatbot in the bottom right corner of their website that literally covers up buttons I use all the time for ordering, so that I have to scroll now in order to access those controls (Chrome, MacOS). After testing it with various queries it only seems to provide answers to questions in their pre-existing support documentation. This is not about choice (see above, they are the only game in town), and it is not about entitlement (we're a tiny shop trying to serve our customers' often obscure book requests). They seemed to literally place the chatbot buttons onto their website with no polling of their users. This is an anecdotal report about Ingram specifically.
- brookst 1y ago
  Is it specific to AI or have they made other bad UI choices over the years?
  - babymetal 1y ago
    Very recently their "advanced search" page was redone with a totally different and slightly more modern styling (prior to addition of the chat expert overlaid in the corner). The rest of Ingram's ordering site is still the same as five years ago and is clearly older than that. That's objective; subjectively, it feels like there are individuals who were given the ability to "try new stuff" and "break things" who chose to follow the hype around features that look like this. The chat button seems to me to be an exercise in following-the-herd which actually sucks for me as a user with it blocking my old buttons.
xdennis 1y ago
> I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores It's ridiculous to compare bad human books with bad AI books because there many human books which are life-changing, but there isn't a single AI book which isn't trash.
arexxbifs 1y ago
Opting out is easy, we can just stop using products from Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Google. Of course, for many that also means opting out of their job, which is a great way to opt out of a home, a family, healthcare, dental care and luxuries like food. I don't think it's entitlement to make a well-mannered complaint about how little choice we actually have when it comes to the whims of the tech giants.
conartist6 1y ago
Did you even read the post? The whole point is that "just don't buy it" as a strategy doesn't work anymore for consumers to guide the market when the companies have employed the rock-for-dessert gambit to avoid having to try to sell their products on their merits.
jmull 1y ago
You really think we should all either happily accept AI-generated emails or opt out of having an email address at all?

amelius 1y ago

There are plenty of non AI books on Amazon.

jacquesm 1y ago
Yes. But you can't tell which is which unless you cut off the data of writing at the release date of ChatGPT.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]