Those 'tech bro's' think they know what's best for you and what's best for their own wallet ?

Privacy, the environment and productivity be damned...

For their own wallet. Period.

^this^

I was about say, it's because these people think they are better than everyone else, and they know what's best for you. You are not as smart as them after all.

They also need you to for money. They need your person and data to fulfill contracts and AI training.

Everyone is making their AI opt out because nobody would choose to opt in.

Exactly this. It’s exactly the same as advert consent popups defaulting to “yes, of course I want to be tracked by all and sundry so they can sell my data”

The puzzle with AI though is why? How can you make any money from it? Answer ….errrr ….. at the moment, you can’t. So that leaves the only other revenue stream - sell your user’s data to the advertising industry.

Sounds familiar?

Phase 1. [1]Collect users .

Phase 2. ?

Phase 3. Profit!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ih_TQWqCA

Far too many people are far too (insert your choice of pithy words here) to understand or care...

(insert your choice of pithy words here)

normal

Isn't this a breach of GDPR?

Fining said companies, and even more luck getting said fines paid

Unfortunately this will likely need the summary [redacted] of executives by a totalitarian regime to encourage [redacted] behaviour.

Not sure I want to live in that world either.

That's probably a difficult question to answer. There are definitely parts of it that might be?

Word's spellchecker suddenly having more opinions isn't processing my private data. _Unless_ I happen to be editing my CV, or something.

Because most people like it and want it. The Apple boards were full of "when can I get AI on my posts when Apple announced AI.

I've turned it off on my Mac and my iPhone is to old. I've turned off Siri and all forms of automated help and suggestions on all my devices, but I'm in a minority in my family and among my friends, some of whom use emojis FFS. I've never used an emoji unless you count colons and brackets.

I set my cousin's new Mac up over Christmas and she loves Siri and autocorrect. I can't imagine why anyone would want to talk to a computer but she can't imagine why you would want to type when you can just talk and she wants "one of those talking box music playing things" for her birthday because her mate showed her how to play Neil Diamond and buy bog rolls or something just by shouting at a box on the sideboard. She's even played with Chat GPT somehow and loves it, as do loads of people judging by the vast majority of eBay sellers who use the AI description writer, and when Apple AI starts suggesting responses to emails and messages my cousin will no doubt embrace that too.

We're a niche crowd here and the coming revolution makes me shudder, but most of the population will love it.

You said it all.

I know one IT person that likes it, but he's a lazy sod that uses ChatGPT to write appalling code and then his colleagues fix it in exasperation having failed to get him to respond adequately to code reviews.

Everyone else I know that uses AI is not an IT person, and it amuses me as they say or type in questions then spend ages trying to reword the question to get a vaguely useful answer before usually giving up.

Do they not have a 'Reject' button as part of the code review process?

"Apple" is the keyword here: their fabled walled garden an Jobs' phrase "people don't know what they want until you show it to them" are the cornerstone of this behavior.

MS et al started mindlessly copying Apple's actions because they were successful and one slippery slope later, we are here: our machines are not actually ours but remain the property of big tech, users are treated with absolute contempt, tolerated only as beta testers or because more money can be extracted from them by any means necessary.

Adding all this "AI" crap everywhere just wastes time as we now have to work around the huge piles of shite that are being forced on us. Yes, it has a uses but that doesn't mean I want to use it. If a company invested heavily in it and is now struggling to make any money from it, my advice is to swallow your losses and move on. It's never going to make you any money so all you are doing is pissing more money down the drain. Enshitification is the the appropriate term because they are adding shit to everything.

I have no problems with "AI" apart from it's severely misleading name. In the end it's a just tool and people like to choose the tools they use and really, REALLY HATE being forced to use specific tools.

While Apple, MS and Google rush to force enable AI features that users don't want by default, Samsung have done the opposite.

A recent update added a slew of "AI" features to my S22 Ultra, all turned OFF by default. And, they included a single settings screen that controls all of them.

Seems some devs triumphed over manglement for once.

That's almost a good enough reason to buy Samsung next time ...

Not really.

The only selling point of the new Samsung is "It has AI"

Plus they are amongst the worst for bloat.

My Microsoft 365 had Copilot added a few days ago. I can't opt-out except by switching my account to Microsoft 365 Family Classic, which isn't an option offered to me.

As for the apps running locally on my Mac, there is no way of removing Copilot (though you can stop it doing anything via Privacy settings) except by deleting the apps and installing old pre-Copilot versions.

It's a bit easier to get rid of Copilot on Windows, where the apps have a disable Copilot option.

" After all, the benevolence of the tech industry has always looked after customers. Nobody asked for never-ending updates, and yet here we are. "

I wouldn't necessarily call that benevolence. I'd call it shipping a substandard product sooner, and patching the problems as they get spotted/exploited rather than putting more effort into having a secure design from the outset.

The ability to continually update is a double edged sword. It gives us the ability to have the latest versions and fixes, but it gives them the ability to be lazy and do the fixes later (if at all).

A lot of authors and editors find themselves being put in a difficult position by these tools appearing - they are often contractually obliged not to use Generative AI with the documents they are handling, but suddenly their word processor is feeding everything they have into it anyway without asking or giving them an option to disable it. On Google Workspaces people talked about having to escalate to third line support (most of a day on the phone just to get there) in order to have Google enable the menu that already existed to turn it off. There is so much wrong with that picture.

It may be that the ultimate consequence is a wider move to tools like LibreOffice for people that care and a loss of market share for the companies pushing this nonsense. I hope that they will face some kind of justice for treating us the way they have when this bubble bursts.

Because they're a bunch of scammers who see the iceberg coming and hope this well-executed re-arrangement of the deck chairs convinces people all is well??

I've just done a review of my company's data consent options. We show checkboxes for data use options at sign up, with them all defaulted to off. Once signed up, the profile editing section then shows the same options.

Comparing to a slew of competitors I was shocked at how many defaulted to opted in at sign up with no ability to opt out. Some had a global consent option with a checkbox, but forced you to accept in order to complete the sign up. One showed several options, but ignored the choices made and opted you in (that has to be a bug).

Opting out of several competitors data consent use once signed up meant closing your account entirely. One actually forces you to email a request to opt out of anything, including bulk emails.

So this AI opt in doesn't come as a surprise.

I just wonder what are the legal ownership or copyright implications of using an AI to create something? If I write something using AI to make it 'better', do I now it or does the AI supplier?

Could it be because these AI pushers have 'bet the farm' so-to-speak and now need to see some ROI?

1. Monetise from how people have been using this stuff.

2. Force it to be ubiquitous then start charging the users.

3. All the above.

Apple Intelligence does not work on my iPhones or Macs, they're too old. It does work on my iPad. it's been turned off with extreme prejudice. CoPilot has been turned off on all MS stuff. I don't have any Google/Amazon/other AI crap.

The day may yet come when this stuff cannot be turned off. Then I will need some volunteers to assist in storming the gates of Hell... ah, MS, Apple, Google, Amazon... and putting the heads of senior executives on stakes.