Last week, Copilot made an unsolicited appearance in Microsoft 365. This week, Apple turned on Apple Intelligence by default in its upcoming operating system releases. And it isn’t easy to get through any of Google’s services without stumbling over Gemini.
Regulators worldwide are keen to ensure that marketing and similar services are opt-in. When dark patterns are used to steer users in one direction or another, lawmakers pay close attention.
But, for some reason, forcing AI on customers is acceptable. Rather than asking “we’re going to shovel a load of AI services into your apps that you never asked for, but our investors really need you to use, is this OK?” the assumption instead is that users will be delighted to see their formerly pristine applications cluttered with AI features.
Customers have not asked for any of this. There has been no clamoring for search summaries, no pent-up demand for the revival of a jumped-up Clippy. There is no desire to wreak further havoc on the environment to get an almost-correct recipe for tomato soup. And yet here we are, ready or not.
Without a choice to opt in, the beatings will continue until AI adoption improves or users find that pesky opt-out option.
lmao, who is going to OPT INto the anti-privacy replace-your-job machine?
Because most people are too lazy and/or stupid to bother up opting out. If they had an authentic metric for demand then they couldn’t trick the share value into going up.
Edit: fixed autocowrecks
For the user data. That’s it. That’s why it exists. That and the dream of replacing some jobs.
I tried co-pilot. Once.
I asked it “why does Windows Defender peg my HDD* at 100%”
The reply was “I don’t know, but here are some google searches that might help”
Microsoft’s own co-pilot doesn’t seem to have access to microsoft products, so now I uninstall/deactivate it every opportunity I can.
*yes, a HDD. Not ideal for performance these days, but it’s the last laptop I have with a HDD, and I use it for experiments.
I call bullshit. Because no LLM ever says, “I don’t know.” It just confidently invents an answer out of thin air.
Only mostly facetious here…
I guessed it was the classic “first one comes free, the next one we’ll see”. They are offering AI for free to make people dependent on the technology, once people can’t live without their AI, then corporations will start profiting from subscriptions.
Because very few people are ever going to turn an optional feature on, whether they would ultimately like it or not. They need to be shown it. If they hate it, they will turn it off.
They can be offered to choose.
Opt-out is always bad because it is meant to exploit users who are not aware that a certain feature can be turned off. Even among those who do, not all are confidently going through settings.
AI is data hungry. If they opt you in, they also get more data from you automatically.
Even if everyone opts out on day 2, they get a crap ton of free stuff in the meantime.
Data collection. And hoping to stumble upon consistently useful use cases yet-unknown.
what happened to asking permission first?
Masculine energy I guess.The reason is probably the indexing takes a lot of time. You can’t just turn AI on and expect it to work. You need to turn it on and wait for it to dig through all your data and index it for fast retrieval
It’s kind of funny that even for “dumb search”, Microsoft turned on indexing by default and always made it difficult to disable. However the search was so crappy that there was never a benefit to it.
lmao when have tech companies ever given a semblance of a shit about consent. It’s an industry that has deep roots in misogynistic nerds and drunk frat bros
Because they are trash that wish to force their garbage on us. Next question.
It is to circumvent E2E encryption and get all your data. here is a good video that gives a great summary: https://youtu.be/yh1pF1zaauc
I heard Windows was adding a “snapshot” and guessed that’s what they were doing, but uhh… are there really “AI Screens” hardware doing this too?
Not yet on pc, but iPhone 16 has a chip already and the new copilot certified laptops will have it as well. MacOS has the capabilities already with that Daemon mentioned in the video.
The era of surveillance is making huge progress every week.
At least there’s still an opt out…
Odds on the opt out actually opting you out instead of pretending to?
Yeah, it’s called switching away from these shit-ass invasive products wherever possible.
For now
Because they need a constant stream of data to feed the models. If people had to opt in then they’d be less likely to do so and the models would starve and become less accurate and therefore less valuable to sell. Remember the trained model is the valuable piece of the entire thing, that’s what companies pay money to gain access to. There’s no point in sitting on all that user data if they can’t turn it into a marketable product by feeding it into a model.
