Ask HN: Anyone else tired of AI being forced on you?
What won't they force AI into? Everywhere I look they have hastily shoehorned AI into something. The power button on a Galaxy S24 is now the Gemini button. Every search engine has 'AI Suggestions'. Even Logitech ships AI tools with its 'Logi Options+', I just wanted to reconfigure my buttons FFS. I didn't ask for this 'Powered by ____ AI' future, shame on you if you did.
Anyone else get the feeling that AI is a net loss for humanity? Search already made us lazy, now we don't even have to think about the answer, just regurgitate what the AI said. Don't even read your email, just have AI summarize what an AI probably wrote.
Then there's a strange dismissal of AI's failures. You can blame the AI for a failure, but if you were to arrive at the same conclusion/result, it would be your fault. It's become some sort of ownership offloading. Easier to blame the machine than take responsibility?
Where are the environmentalists? AI uses 10x the energy (and thus 10x carbon emissions) as search. That doesn't include the resources and energy to make the hardware and train the models in the first place. I can't think of any device or tool where people would tolerate a 10x increase in energy usage to complete the same task. People don't care what happens in the Datacenter until its next door to them causing problems.
I find it very useful for generating boilerplate code, unit tests, etc. It's a great tool for doing certain work. I don't need or want it shoved into everything because every Product Manager and Sales team seems to think it's a good idea to drive 'growth factors' or some other BS.
No, not really. The power button on the galaxy was previously a bixby button. They just changed the assistant that gets called uppon. AI Suggestions in search engines are sometimes practical and you can always choose to ignore them. AI is only a net loss for humans that use it instead of thinking. Used well its an incredible tool. Same goes to ownership offloading. Our company heavily encourages AI use, but the work you create with it is your responsibility. So if you dont check it, you are the one to blame. The energy consumption is really a thing that needs to be talked about, but its not that bad as its often stated. We already use buttloads of energy to stream movies, stream games, do stupid crypto stuff and the amount of bad mouthing AI gets for its energy consumption is just not proportional. If i run a local LLM on my GPU i am a forest killer, but using the same GPU to run a heavy game is ok?
yes, I would assume 90% of people who aren't easily swayed by hype are tired of it being shoehorned everywhere, and simultaneously none of us can do anything about it because investors are heart-eyed over it.
But those are an insignificant sub-population of the people who buy things.
Optimistically, only 5% of the things that AI is bolted on to today will provide any value over time (which is better than the 0% rate for Blockchain a few years ago). My exhaustion comes from having to constantly sift through the fluff to find the promising aspects.
> Where are the environmentalists?
The environmentalists have been screaming from the rooftops about it for a while. But activists can only do so much, compared to huge multinationals with marketing budgets bigger than some countries GDPs...
I hope that what comes from the LLM (I can't call it AI) revolution is a serious society-wide look and discussion about the false economy we currently live in and some ideas to change it.
Let's face it. Huge portions of the population are performing unnecessary jobs in order to sustain themselves. Most products and services available to us today are unnecessary, unsustainable, destructive (economically and socially), and many represent a huge bubble which will hurt us down the line. LLM have exposed the sort of office jobs which have been automatable for years.
We are killing ourselves mentally and spiritually, as well as the planet we live on, so everybody can drive to offices to respond to emails or to create carbon-copies of the same already existing products and hoping marketing makes the difference.
> Most products and services available to us today are unnecessary, unsustainable, destructive (economically and socially
Can you provide some examples of this to anchor your argument?
I can sometimes come up with a few niche jobs, but not really that many overall.
I can also see a lot of bloat in large orgs, but those companies are typically providing big value somewhere.
I just want to understand which jobs we're talking about in this frequently-made argument.
I am tired of AI being shoved into everything in a way that makes it "AI first". I don't know exactly what this will end up looking like but rsyslog is trying to do "AI first" in their primary product. Rsyslog is or was a great light-weight and incredibly flexible logging daemon. When I see them say "AI first" it makes me cringe. If AI was a separate, entirely optional bolt on product and package I would not be concerned at all. I am concerned they are about to bloatify, enshittify, hyppeify, crappify a great product. Maybe they won't. Or maybe they lose all sense of priorities and lose great developers and fade into history only to be replaced by some new daemon created without knowing all the lessons learned over the decades and we have to experience all those painful evolutionary steps all over again such as collaborating with hundreds of companies to narrow down interpretations of RFC's. Or maybe they are just leaving out too many details for me.
I see other products trying to do this as well. My intuition tells me this is not going to end well. I could be entirely wrong. I really hope I am wrong. Maybe it's just purely hype and products will not lose what makes them great. Maybe it will just be some burnt development cycles. Or maybe it will really just be making new application connectors, formatting and protocols to be more AI friendly.
[1] - https://www.rsyslog.com/rsyslog-goes-ai-first-a-new-chapter-...
Oh, I see the problem.
You're using consumer-tier level gear.
So they're assuming consumer-tier level desires.
Try some professional gear.
PS Installing consumer driver and or config stuff like that is a classic trap for spyware and accidental vulns.
Alternatives to Logi Options+ include BetterMouse, LinearMouse, and Barrier, which offer similar customization and functionality for Logitech devices.
These options can help reduce resource usage and provide a smoother experience.
I will look at those options, thank you!
I’m beyond tired of hearing people complain about AI. Just stop already. If you don’t like it, don’t use it, find a job where people don’t like it and work there. It’s exhausting how Luddite the tech community has unironically become.
I can't "not use it" when my medical insurance sticks an AI between me and the ability to talk to a human or uses an AI to deny my insurance claims.
I can't "not use it" when my VP uses an AI to decide who to lay off in the next wave of cuts.
I can't "not use it" when my governor sets up an AI review of statewide regulation to decide what regulation to remove.
"My boss says that I have to use an LLM to program" is way way way below my worries of "society's bosses use LLMs to entrench their power and abuse labor because they are upset about the labor gains made in the post-covid era."
We keep complaining because Big Tech keeps shoving this unmitigated garbage down our collective throats.
When the boot is on the neck, you don't stop complaining until it has been removed. It's as simple as that.
Yes, but you placing your neck under that boot is a free choice. I admit, sometimes a little tricky to avoid, but a free choice still. As far as I know, there is always an option but please correct me if I am wrong.
With that said I think technology overall has become increasingly worse over the years in some ways. God, do I miss a TV without an OS.
Nah its not. You dont have a lot of free choice here, and your options are very severely biased. Its a bit like the old christian thing where you are free to choose, but if you dont choose JC you go to hell...
But you don't go to hell, the consequence isn't real.
So when you bring it back to big tech, you've defeated your own argument.
> Yes, but you placing your neck under that boot is a free choice.
Bollocks. We're not talking about going to a chat bot and asking questions. That's a free choice. It's insertion into every facet of online life is unavoidable and far more destructive.
I'd love to not use it. Can you tell me how to keep Android or Microsoft or Google from shoving it everywhere, raising prices for that privilege and hoovering up all my data with it?
I avoid those platforms already and use Linux/Mac OS instead. Android and Windows were openly hostile to user privacy before ChatGPT became publicly available.
And if Apple shoves too much AI into their products I’ll drop Mac OS too.
I just finished a call with a friend who is a power user of Gemini, to great benefit. I delivered a PC with tensor cores for when he wants to do more locally. AI is a critically helpful and growing presence in his career.
Conversely, I spent an hour one day trying to prevent Gmail from puking text onto every new email I begin. It turned out to be a Chrome feature and scrapping Chrome is the only way to stop it. Past that is more time spent working out how to disable Gemini and remove it's elements, so it's unwanted presence isn't triggered into being a problem.
Every month I have to review the list of registry edits I use to keep copilot's unwanted advances out of my users' workspace. Notably, there isn't one for Win11 notepad and MS CP has to be disabled manually thru the UI.
Of these two preferences, major tech respects just one. The other one is continually acted on, leveraged and intruded upon - with tech corps showing no more understanding of consent than Harvey Weinstein did. If AI is on the table, what we want is just an obstacle for UI devs to overcome.
Is Notepad++ an option?
I hear your concern, and you're absolutely right to be thinking about this. It's true that AI development involves intense competition, and that can feel overwhelming - like we're all just passengers on a train we can't control. But I don't think we're as powerless as it might seem.
Throughout history, we've found ways to guide powerful technologies toward better outcomes, even when there were strong economic incentives pushing in other directions. Think about how we've developed safety standards for cars, regulations for medicines, or international agreements around nuclear technology. It took time and effort, but people working together made a real difference.
When it comes to AI, we still have meaningful choices. We can support leaders who take these issues seriously, back companies that are genuinely trying to develop AI responsibly, and speak up when we see problems. We can also stay informed and help others understand what's happening - sometimes the most important thing is just having honest conversations about what we want our future to look like.
A little ironic to be posting LLM replies about this topic
My previous company was full on the AI train, too. Super tiring. But fun having access to Gemini. It's so bad half of the time...
They were so proud to announce in ~February that they will sum up our comments on the internal survey using Copilot (probably)!
I'm so tired of opening every program or app I have to use for work and being met by a popup or notification that I can, should I wish, do something with AI. I can't even change focus of a Meet window without it popping up suggesting Gemini, and I can see that notification countless times in a day. Can't turn it off, I'm not an Org Admin.
I just want to not have it shoved in my face. It's exhausting.
I respect apple more now that they don’t shove this crap into my face
AI buttons are a fad, they’ll be gone soon. Just like Clippy (an assistant for Microsoft Word in the 90s). https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3G_uCbKoG5A&pp=ygUGQ2xpcHB5
The real uses of AI will be far more subtle.
Yes. The overlords think they’ll ultimately save money so they all want in on it.
It's odd that you cite Gemini on the S24 as the straw that broke the camel's back when Bixby (and its dedicated button) has been around since 2017.
I very much enjoy grok shoehorning itself into will stancils apartment
The only thing I don’t like is products raising prices “because of AI features” like google workspace increasing prices.
Like dawg I don’t use Gemini I just use your email and google drive.
Fuck.
You know it is going to shit when even Inuit Quickbooks now has "AI". Not sure for what.
I think it's useful but there's all this peripheral administrative/training stuff my current employer is forcing us through that's pretty annoying.
Yes, very much so, to the point were I may move to a burner phone.
> What won't they force AI into?
Toasters?
Oh wait. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/10/intelligent-...
We've seen where that ends up... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
True :)
Toasters that don't burn your toast? That would be one of the more useful applications if it worked.
https://www.theverge.com/22801890/sunbeam-radiant-control-to...
To do that, they need some sort of sensors to determine how much heat your bread has received. And that's hardware, and that costs money per unit. So: no way.
The center cannot hold.
We will see either one of two things:
(a) a massive market crash which nearly destroys the software industry and for a time wreaks havoc on the global economy, or (b) a soft crash due to external smoothing effects because never underestimate the power of fake billionaire money; along with a severe bifurcation of tech markets where simultaneously we see slop dominate poor quality mainstream products and then the higher-end luxury products either minimize or outright remove all mention of AI because it's become such a low-brow, tainted brand.
(On that last note, we already have evidence that consumers see that something is now "AI-powered" or whatever and they like it LESS. It will eventually become the kiss of death.)
> AI uses 10x the energy (and thus 10x carbon emissions) as search
This says more that search takes almost no energy than it does about the huge environmental toll of AI.
In this day and age when “but the environment!” Is one of your key arguments, you’ve already lost. The environment is cooked and nobody cares. People (in the societal sense) say they care but every action they take says the opposite.
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It's like cookies. Eventually they'll stop when they realize the consumer doesn't want it /s
Or adtech. ;-(
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Not all new tech is good. As someone who experienced life before smartphones, I can unironically and without hyperbole say that life was better back then, and people were smarter and more informed. Now imagine this dumbification on steroids: That's what the AI revolution is.