Ask HN: Anyone else tired of AI being forced on you?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh, I see the problem.

You're using consumer-tier level gear.

So they're assuming consumer-tier level desires.

Try some professional gear.

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-...

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 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-...