In fairness to the 99.99% they don't even know what a bootloader is and if they understood the situation and the risks many of them would also favor an open option.
I don't think the rejection of AI is primarily a HN thing though. It's my non-tech friends and family who have been most vocal in complaining about it. The folks here are more likely to have browser extensions and other workarounds or know about alternative services that don't force AI on you in the first place.
True. And awareness and education is very important for useful discourse.
> if they understood the situation and the risks many of them would also favor an open option.
Raising my hand as one of those people who knows what a bootloader is and also doesn't currently care about an open option. Maybe at some time in the future I will again, but for now it is very far down on my list of concerns.
I suspect whether or not AI is useful/high-quality/"good"/etc is just not important to most poeple at the moment. If they are laid off from their jobs in the future and replaced with an AI, I suspect they'll start caring more.
But in the general case, I've found "caring ahead-of-time" (for want of a better phrase) is a very hard thing to encourage, despite the fact that it's one of the most effective things you can do if you direct it at the "right" avenues (i.e. those that will affect you directly in the future).
The people I know who “worry” are terrible about predicting negative events that impact them. I think that’s why it’s uncommon, lots of negative health outcomes and almost zero actual benefits.
Instead simply aiming for reasonable levels of resiliency in health, finances, etc tends to cover a huge range of issues. In that context having a preference for open systems makes a lot of sense, but focusing a lot of effort on it doesn’t.
I'm sure google thinks that people have some sort of bias, and that if they force people to use it they'll come to like it (just like google plus), but this also shows how much google looks down on the free will of its users.
I do think it's as simple as appealing to stakeholders in whatever way they can, regardless of customer satisfaction. As we've seen as of late, the stock markets are completely antithetical to the improvement of people's lives.
The first point does indeed come into play because oftentimes most people don't throw enough of a fuss against it. But everything has some breaking point; Microsoft's horribly launched Copilot for Office 365 showed one of them
[0]: https://www.warc.com/content/feed/ai-is-a-turn-off-for-consu...
[1]: https://hbr.org/2025/01/research-consumers-dont-want-ai-to-s...
I don’t think the little “ChatGPT might be wrong, you should check” disclaimer is doing very much.
Reddit sure isn't an ideal place for fact checks. It's full of PR bots and shills, but at least there are still humans commenting and I can't fault people for doing what they can in the best way they know how.
https://chatgpt.com/share/679d7f5f-d508-8010-94fa-df9d554b62...
(and then I just remembered that the free version doesn’t have web search)
You used to be able to put 'Eliza' to sleep by using the word 'Dreamt'
Coincidentally today, I received an automated text from my heath care entity along the lines of, "Please recognize this number as from us. Our AI will be calling you to discuss your heath."
No. I'm not going to have a personal discussion with an AI.
That sets off super strong scam vibes to me... Our banking industry here and medical industry pushes phishing information down your throat so much people even worry about legitimate communication that couldn't possibly be a scam being a scam.
I find that to be better for society but definitely clouds my judgement on those kinds of text. Also I have absolutely dropped my previous bank because it became impossible to speak to an actual human and willingly pay more for a bank where my phonecall goes directly to a human.
Do what one of the other commenters mentioned, make the AI an assistant for the human beings that help your customers, let the humans communicate with humans.
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1czcjze/how_is_ai_o...
Mainstream press have been covering how much people hate it - people's grandparents are getting annoyed by it. Worse, it comes on the heels of four years of Prabhakar Raghavan ruining Google Search for the sake of trying to pump ad revenue.
It's a steaming pile of dogshit that either provides useless information unrelated to what you searched for and is just another thing to scroll past, and even worse, provides completely wrong information half the time, which means even if the response seems to be what you asked, it's still useless because you can't trust it.
When it's integrated into a product people are more likely to use it. Lowering the barrier to entry so to speak.