This is a tech rant.
My mother got absolutely frustrated with her computer today. I don’t blame her. Buttons moving, “upgrades” that break functionality, out-of-date help pages that try to sum up different models of products all on one page referencing buttons that may or may not exist. YouTube videos with mislabeled and misleading titles and descriptions and google ads that misdirect you when you’re looking for the original manuals for something… the deck is absolutely stacked against us and I don’t understand how this complete and utter sustained failure of useability doesn’t earn greater backlash.
I’m by no means a Luddite. I’m not slow at grasping functionality. I don’t fear technology. I LIKE reading manuals, though release notes can go STRAIGHT to Hell. I enjoy problem-solving and helping others do the same and TRY not to act too smug about it. But this has begun to feel malicious.
Designers moving application buttons, gamifying basic functionality, changing hot keys and randomly changing processes. For over a decade you held the shift key down in an Adobe product to maintain proportions when changing an images side. One day this reversed. After several years of finally almost getting used to proportions being locked by default last week this has been reversed AGAIN.
Microsoft and Adobe have defaulted to saving to the cloud. The former sort of makes sense – but no really, generally I really want to save to my COMPUTER. Which I (mostly) OWN. Which is in my house. Which is where I am typing the THING. I shouldn’t have to argue with my computer EVERY TIME about saving locally! With Adobe it makes even less sense. I generate TERABYTES of data daily. Why the FUCK would I want to sit here and wait for that to save to the cloud?!
Add to that the incredibly aggressive incursion of “AI” functionality it begins to feel BEYOND malicious and downright dystopian. The idea that my Facebook Messenger’s emoji button gets swapped with another icon (search for emoji?) after you start typing, but once you’ve entered three words the button, which is perilously close to the “Send” button is transformed once again to a pencil icon. In almost any app a pencil icon merely means edit, or maybe refers to drawing, but this pops all your text into an AI dialog that offers to rewrite your text via AI. I enter this dialog pretty frequently by accident and have absolutely no desire to use it.
I appreciate good autocorrect. I appreciate grammar check on a real document. But for texting and instant messages I do NOT need something constantly offering its recommendations.
Kristen’s been trying to shut off Google’s Gemini AI writing functionality in her Gmail. It took a tech support chat and someone claiming they’d bend the rules for her because “enabling the functionality to disable the AI writing assistant” isn’t something available in a free or Professional account… it’s only available for Enterprise customers!
Searching for “why is AI being pushed so hard in messaging apps and email” was a half-assed effort at researching this, but Google responds with this (AI-generated) response : “AI is being pushed hard primarily due to a combination of factors including rapid technological advancements, the potential for significant economic benefits across various industries, competitive pressures between companies to adopt AI first, and the belief that it can significantly improve productivity by automating tasks and providing insights that humans alone cannot access; however, concerns around job displacement and potential misuse of AI are also growing alongside this push.” E.g. it’s being pushed so hard because damn, it’s just too valuable NOT to use!
And the first search result it returns is “A big reason AI is being pushed so hard is we’ve reached the limit of human productivity.”
That’s MADNESS.
It’s literally being FORCED on users. You can’t shut the button off in Instant Messenger. It’s the third most-used messaging app in the world with over 1 billion regular users and they just popped a new button in that no-one wants, is literally hidden from users till it SNEAKS under the finger at which point it sends your message not to your friend but to Meta so it can rewrite it for you!
You must ARGUE with someone to shut it off in Gmail, the most-used email service in the WORLD accounting for almost HALF of all email users.
My guess is that this push is actually to force more textual data into the learning pool for large language models. I haven’t paid enough attention, but it DOES seem that this forced usage perhaps coincides with the copyright lawsuits over where LLMs are sourcing their data. Yup, we ARE the product.
And I don’t see a way out. All these products are too big to fail, too ubiquitous to just move away from. I see a couple of people moving away from Facebook (over moral issues, not useability) but the vast majority are staying as it rolls out AI writing of your posts, AI summation of other’s posts, AI generation of our avatars and profile pictures… it’s wrecked our infosphere and our family Life, now it’s wrecking ITSELF – how bad does it have to be before we’d disconnect?
I’m tired of writing this. I’m screaming into the void. And I’ll, probably, check into Instagram or Facebook before I go to sleep tonight because I’m as guilty as anyone. But damn it, at least I WROTE all of this myself.
Shut up. Spellcheck doesn’t count.
I want to read YOUR virgin words….fu** AI