Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?
theregister.com
theregister.com
So now whenever I type in GMail I have an annoying "Polish" button to distract me from the writing. Not the worst change, but certainly a net negative. And why would I ever want to translate to Polish anyway? You won't even find any Polish text in my email anywhere.
I'm sorry, I think you're confused. That annoyance you feel is the feeling of technology innovators innovating to make the world a better place. Change is good.
I'm looking forward to the singularity, where Silicon Valley will finally improve the human experience to the point where it will be pure inescapable annoyance, felt constantly all the time.
The haters needs to keep their negativity to themselves, get out of the way of the builders, and be positive about what they're building.
> And why would I ever want to translate to Polish anyway?
This must be some new encryption scheme. Polish looks like hashed plaintext.
Apple Intelligence was particularly a let down. It just got in the way, adding noise and distraction and not adding anything useful.
The lack of thought to include a "not now" like they do elsewhere shows how it's a real half-asses effort and management is just trying to get something, anything, out the door ASAP, utility or effectiveness be damned. If Jobs came back there would be several immediate firings of VPs and probably a C level or two. It's just absolutely chaotic and user hostile.
If you're a product person at a Big Tech, making your AI feature opt-out means you can justify a promotion with "My new generative AI feature has seen record fast adoption with 200 MILLION Weekly Active Users"
And if you're an executive, you can claim any customer value comes from the AI features, which the stock market likes right now.
Consent should be required if you're collecting private data for marketing or for training an LLM/etc.
But, I don't think adding some ML functionality to an application (say, OCR to a PDF reader, or translation to posts on a social network) inherently requires getting customers' consent any more than adding any other feature would.
I can appreciate the annoyance over "formerly pristine applications cluttered with AI features" since it's the current trend - but see it as similar to the annoyance over flat design (which rarely even had an opt-out) as opposed to something that needs a legal prohibition.
I don't think it's particularly absurd to make an analogy to other foundational technologies. When relational databases were invented, and enabled a ton of new & better capabilities across a host of user-facing software, it would have been strange to let users "opt-out" into the more limited, simpler experiences that could still be supported on earlier data architectures. And what would it even mean, practically? Maintain two separate data management systems, one relational and one legacy?
AI is almost certainly going to be like that, threaded throughout the designs of essentially everything above a certain level of computational complexity.
I'd even be surprised if a decade from now there are 0 models in the Linux kernel. If a SOTA model for I/O scheduling existed & was clearly superior for a broad range of scenarios, why wouldn't Linux adopt it as the default?
It's opt-put because most people won't opt-out, if only because they can't be bothered. Lacking strong privacy laws, the user agreements probably say that all their data can be used for any variety of uses. "We're going to use your data to help make our AI features better? Oh, sure, that's great!" (Most people won't think of the privacy implications.)
What fraction of general consumers think this? 15%? 5%?
I have met zero that think this way, and I muck with the stuff a lot.
I think that executives feel this way but I don't think many of general consumers think having AI is the latest and greatest.
That is certainly what the vendors would _like_ consumers to think. It’s not what consumers think, though, particularly in the developed world: https://business.yougov.com/content/50504-ai-integration-int... (the headline buries the lede a bit; in most major developed markets it would actively put off more people than it would turn on.)