Such a cool guide to such a bizarre problem we live in…
Companies forcing features that nobody wants, but that are also expensive to operate and cost real money to run? Market can definitely stay irrational for long.
Such a cool guide to such a bizarre problem we live in…
Companies forcing features that nobody wants, but that are also expensive to operate and cost real money to run? Market can definitely stay irrational for long.
Nobody using it is actually the ideal outcome. AI features are added, at no additional cost to the consumer, to extract money from investors. If customers began using the product, this feature would actually start having an ongoing cost.
I suspect it's also a defensive move.
Imagine you make a widely hated product targeted at huge corporations. Workday, Jira, Oracle Financials, anything like that.
Then you find that all your users are using ChatGPT to automate their interactions with your product. Instead of your product being crucial to your customers' business and almost impossible to replace, it's turning into a dumb pipe connecting LLMs - and looking very much threatened.
After all, data lock-in is a core part of your business strategy.
Getting people to use your AI tool, though? That makes your product stickier, and lets you charge more too.
Thing with investor money is that after a while the investors start asking where their dividends are at. If you put all that money toward building features nobody asked for, you're in for a rough time.
> after a while the investors start asking where their dividends are at
By then, a new fad will come in and you can just pivot to it.
We went from "engagement" (with no concrete plans to monetize said engagement), through a brief period of "blockchain" and now finally AI.
> engagement" (with no concrete plans to monetize said engagement)
Google and Meta have made billions monetizing said engagement
Eh, this is true prior to an IPO, but listed companies (like every single one doing this shit) are very much beholden to shareholders and quarterly reports.
Woe betide the company cursed with smart investors
> Companies forcing features that nobody wants
Literally every day that I browse HN I hear people complain about others' use of LLMs. How can you say "nobody wants" when it's used so much to elicit endless complaints?
we’ve reached the stage of market consolidation where corporations dictate consumer behavior, not vice versa
We've long been there. Most technology markets are supply driven. People buy what's made available on the market and learn to cope with it. That's big part of why people hate computers so much, and why feigning ignorance about basic device operations is a point of pride for many a normies.
I really do wonder if the market is being irrational or if we just cannot see what they are
I suspect that many people dislike AI but are begrudgingly using it. I would put money very few people are completely avoiding it. It's very hard to avoid now anyways.
Maybe the AI company strategy is really just "make it so invasive in life it's so difficult to avoid and expensive enough to revert that companies and governments will never go back anyways"
Nobody, absolutely nobody wants or likes overlapping rainbow animated "ask AI" buttons plastered over every available inch of screen space. Nobody wants or likes useful features being removed and replaced with colorful bouncing "ask AI" buttons.
You can't say that. Also that isn't happening.
> I suspect that many people dislike AI but are begrudgingly using it.
(Sadly,) many normal folks use ChatGPT in lieu of Google search. I'm continually surprised to, over and over, hear from personal friends that they planned their vacation using ChatGPT.
They were not begrudgingly using it.
Many people do like AI tools and use them regularly. ChatGPT has nearly a billion weekly active users.
It's just that another group of people absolutely hates the idea of AI and wants it to go away.
How many people prefer having an AI gate customer support, for instance? I don't think we are talking about two groups here.
I'm not opposed to it on principle, but it has to actually work.
Every AI phone assistant I've talked to has been pretty terrible, even compared to modern LLMs like ChatGPT voice mode.
I think people like AI tools when it's their choice to engage with them and they set the terms. I have a good experience with Claude largely because I choose when to use it and when I don't care about it's existence, its gone. But the stupid glowing, animated, overlapping Copilot button in Word is the dumbest thing imaginable. I don't want it, and I cant stop being reminded of it.
The simple distinction of pro vs anti ai isn't the root cause, its about individual control and choice which can span both of those stances.
Alternative hypothesis: people do gradually use these features, but HN became a weird anti-AI bubble for some reason.
I mean, many of the features had previous pre-AI attempts. They all sucked much more. This is the first time they have a remote chance of working (but in many cases, timidity or cheapening out is still making them barely usable - which is why 99% of the cases it's still much, much better to throw one of the three SOTA LLMs at the app to operate it (or on its data) from the outside).
Shitty LLM chatbots providing unhelpful (read: lies) customer service is even worse than some Phillippeens or Indian support with terrible scripting and half-broken engrish. At least you could deal with those fucks with demanding a manager or similar.
The LLMs will always do the worse option to customers, to extract more money. Burn'em all to the ground.
No one wants? I understand normies on Facebook saying that, but you are on HN. How do you keep that position with the evidence getting thrown at you daily?
Do you use any of the AI features listed in the article, as shipped in the app? That's not the same thing as coding agents or cobbling together something for yourself.
Nobody wants = nobody on bluesky. I don't get this crusade mentality.
The bigger problem with these apps is that they are proprietary and they have been spying on us.
This whole "nobody wants" narrative is getting tiresome. It is provably false, and is just a rhetorical tool.
Prove that they do want them, then.
If I personally wanted to use generative AI, I’d query an agent app on my computer or load ChatGPT in a browser. I wouldn’t want my email client proactively spewing random words into the text area on its own. And I certainly don’t want every bit of information on my screen continuously streamed to a corporate cloud server so that I can ultimately be profiled and surveilled.
> Prove that they do want them, then.
Look at OpenAI revenue just over a year ago. Most of that was not for LLM coding.
Loads of non-technical people I know are paid subscribers $20/mo to ChatGPT (not API, but their actual chat product).