I never imagined that that personality would be working for it's real owner (Amazon, Google et al) and trying to control me.
Until it's MY friend, I am not interested in lending some of my soul to it.
We're not on the correct path are we?
On the generative AI front, OpenAI/Microsoft doesn't control me either. I use it as a coding assistant instead of searching StackOverflow, or when I want to brainstorm lists of other ways of writing the same thing when I don't like what I've written and am not sure the best way to improve it.
Could just be you're approaching the tools wrong? But I can't imagine what you're doing where they're controlling you.
You realize how insane and circular that is, right?
The viewpoint has the potential to trend toward the insane if it is the unconsidered default, for sure. You can’t go around thinking everything that happens to you is a grand conspiracy.
In your situation, though, you are informing systems (that are larger than human ability to productively think about) on how to perform your job.
You do this because those systems allow you a local competitive advantage — you get more done for less work. But your only real hope is that it takes them longer to replace you than it takes you to escape.
And the reason I use Alexa to set a timer is because my hands are occupied in the kitchen. You're overthinking it. Nothing to do with giving up control.
You are overestimating your own agency.
Even if you don't believe Alexa and Siri are recording everything you say, I think it's pretty clear that asking them to play music gives them some power to influence you. You're telling them your musical tastes, and you're (presumably) letting them pick some songs for you. (At the very least, by simply not having the song you asked for available.) One reason, perhaps even the biggest reason, that Amazon and Apple created those products is to sell you more shit, and both of these give them some power to influence your buying habits. Perhaps that power is tiny, and the tradeoff is worth it. They're also trying to influence who you buy from, or what services you subscribe to. Vendor lock-in and all that. Is that not them trying to influence you? Perhaps even to control you?
Instead they said a different thing. No, that's not an example of control. It's a feature I paid for!
I think (and hope) it'll track a similar trajectory to 3d printing:
1. Expensive systems only approachable to large corporations
2. Lower-cost but affordable as a business expense to cottage industry
3. Affordable to hobbyists, but requiring domain expertise to operate
4. COTS plug and play solutions for the wide audience
Right now we are at (1) with the huge scale LLMs, but scaled models are runnable by hobbyists (2-3) and we are at (4) when it comes to things like image generation and music splitting.
For example, an AI slave (lit. robot) is useless to you because then you have the master-slave mentality so half of you is still a slave. Once we're actually OK inside we won't even think we need technology.