Posted by thewebguyd 5 hours ago
It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted. "Generate any image you want!" "Analyse this thing with AI!" gets pretty tiring.
If I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on.
AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap. Sure, people are susceptible to it, and get engaged by it, but it’s not exactly what people want or aspire to.
I want something real, something that makes me feel. AI generated content is by definition fake and not genuine. A human is by definition not putting as much thought and effort into their work when they use AI.
Now someone could put a lot of thought and effort into a project and also use gen AI, but that’s not what’s getting spammed across the internet. AI is low-effort, so of course the pure volume of low effort garbage is going to surpass the volume of high effort quality content.
So it’s basically not possible to like what AI is putting out, generally speaking.
As a productivity enhancer in a small role, sure it’s useful, but that’s not what we’re complaining about.
AI posts / comments on Reddit are made to make you buy stuff.
AI videos are made to keep you engaged, and then serve you ads which at the end make you buy stuff.
Soon ChatGPT will start to weave ads into their output because they'll need to make $.
That doesn't make it useful, unless you think fooling people is itself a goal.
This. After a generation of social media sneaking its surveillance, manipulation, and noisy ads into our home, work and mobile lives, it is very obvious that having something "smart" shoved into tools where it wasn't asked for isn't some noble attempt at improving lives.
Users are tired of being continually and transparently abused.
All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.
And suddenly, internal incentives would be to create useful, conflict-free capabilities users actually choose for themselves.
One can dream. I manage M365 where I work, and MS never opting tenants into anything by default again would save me many hours of work on a seemingly weekly basis now.
The fact that they can abuse even their enterprise customers and still retain them is what blows my mind.
The large org dependency on 365 and microsoft is a serious info-security and national security risk. 0 interest in improving because they know they won't ever see competition
Not that Google is any better, but I really want Google to put more effort into Workspace/GSuite and bring it up on par with M365 and all it includes, at least make Microsoft sweat a little bit that one day there might be a possibility for a competing product that can lure enterprises away. Workspace needs better DLP controls, and more of the enterprise-y things that MS wins at, and a bundled MDM that can manage all OSes, and better identity.
Even if the behemoths won't switch due to re-training & switching costs, MS desperately needs a competitor in this space. Barring that, they need to be broken up and forced to sell each bundled product separately and priced appropriately. Otherwise, who can compete with getting MDM, Identity, 2TB personal storage, 2TB sharepoint storage, Teams, DLP, EDR all for $22/user/month.
how about a couple of weeks of gratitude for magic intelligence in the sky, and then you can have more toys soon?
Sam Altman, Sep 12, 2024
Ironically though, Diablo Immortal was a huge commercial success despite the tone deaf announcement. I don't think MS will experience the same though. They're quickly going to be left with the only people using windows are those who are forced by their employer, no one will willingly choose it over other options.
Oh no, I am definitely unimpressed. That AI you can have a sorta-kinda fluent conversation with is often a complete moron and a habitual liar, and the images it generates are awful - did he not see how horrible that Coke ad looked?
It'll probably end up useful in a bunch of applications soon-ish and I'll probably want to use it eventually, but in the meantime their AI is flooding the internet with absolute garbage, and they are literally shoving AI in my face at every opportunity they get.
It is painfully clear that people just aren't that interested, and they are getting increasingly desperate about finding ways to recoup their massive investments. But people aren't going to magically become enthusiastic about eating rotten garbage if you just keep stuffing it in their mouth!
If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more. But they are in too deep, and admitting defeat and scaling it down until they have an actually good product that people genuinely want means seeing their stock price crater because they will have "lost" the "AI race". Their only option to avoid an immediate collapse is to keep lying through their teeth and keep trying to pretend that it is absolutely amazing and that you just must use it.
Or maybe the CEOs are completely delusional and genuinely believe what they are selling - I'm not sure which one is worse.
He is deliberately and disingenuously missing the point. It's not that the features aren't good (maybe they are, maybe they aren't). It's about how coercive Microsoft and Windows are with its users, and this exec is failing to address that one.
Just once, I'd like to hear a question get through to these assholes asking them why they are forcing so many unwanted things onto their users. From Microsoft accounts to forced windows updates to Recall... Gone are the days when users had any control over what their computers are running.
But these kinds of questions never seem to get through to them.
Its this shenanigans that forced me to nuke my Windows install and go Arch. I noticed that Windows Defender will upload "suspicious" files and there's no audit trail of what's being uploaded. So I have no way of knowing what personal documents or even proprietary software has gone up to their cloud.
Now excuse me while I go talk to my PhD wielding friend about whether the seahorse emoji exists. /s
That doesn't mean I want it plastered everywhere, in every app or website. That doesn't mean I want to interact with or use my computer via AI, and I especially don't want to talk to my computer to do things. Mouse & keyboard is faster.
But for now at least you can just choose not to use it. The problem is, Microsoft is putting 100% of their efforts into this while long-standing Windows bugs and regressions still exist. They're aware they exist too, and are deliberately choosing not to improve their product.
If I want MS Windows I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on
If this is not a statement you can make, then Redmond gets to decide what you use, not you
It's almost as if all the focus has been on eliminating the human... for products designed for humans.
I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about my Word docs. I just want to write my Word docs.
I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about the quarterly report. I certainly don't want it making up values for the quarterly report. I just want to write the quarterly report.
Having a conversation with a computer is cool. It's a fun party trick. If there were a way to reliably get it to know about all of my things, without the concern that it would then take all that data and feed it to its mothership, I might want to be able to converse with it about those things, under certain circumstances.
But, yes: if I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it. Stop acting like me being upset that it's getting shoved in everywhere is the same as me saying "this is a meaningless achievement."
Windows 11 is already adware. No wonder people are complaining about more ads.
But we can't. I can have something styled as a conversation with a token predictor that emits text that, if interpreted as a conversation, will gaslight you constantly, while at best sometimes being accidentally correct (but still requiring double-checking with an actual source).
Yes, I am uninterested in having the gaslighting machine installed into every single UI I see in my life.
I can generate images that are difficult to use commercially. I can analyze something with AI but I can't confidently use that output in any setting that matters.
For people who are attempting to engage in profitable work then AI is miserably unimpressive. I don't know what planet this guy is living on. Time is money. Flowery emails and off axis summaries can only create a waste of that time.
Edit: Found the source: https://www.eurogamer.net/maybe-ai-is-a-creative-solution-if...
Then - like now - it seemed that they couldn't understand that what they made was not what their customers wanted.
"literally"?! What does that mean? That they offloaded all decision-making to AI?
There's nothing underwhelming about AI. It's how Microsoft damages anything it touches, and lies to users about it. They force a stupid "copilot" key into computers and encourage the waste of resources into "chips with AI capabilities", only to push your data to the cloud, deceitfully, and with very poor safety guarantees.
Also, people have a Windows backlash in general, and Microsoft ignores it, as usual.
Everything since then has not really pushed too far passed that "impressive tech demo" state. I like using AI to help me with coding. That's... about it.
"Click this, then that, then this other thing and it should work"
"that other thing isn't an option"
"Oh you're 3 versions behind. Instead, it's in location X."