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Comment by speak_plainly | Hacker News Reader

I opened ChatGPT on my Mac this morning and there was an update.

I updated ChatGPT and a little window popped up asking me to download Atlas. I declined as I already have it downloaded.

There was another window, similar to the update available window, in my chat asking me to download Atlas again...I went to hit the 'X' to close it and I somehow triggered it, it opened my browser to the Atlas page and triggered a download of Atlas.

This was not cool and has further shaken my already low confidence in OpenAI.

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I don't think I've ever encountered a technology pushed quite as hard on unwilling users as AI.

All the other similar cases I can think of are either something universally vilified, like aggressive telemarketers, or outright scams. AI firms are in a good company it seems.

There is a giant, glowing, screaming and shouting reason why and yet everyone pretends it's a mystery still.

> I don't think I've ever encountered a technology pushed quite as hard on unwilling users as AI.

That's why they have to push it so hard. They spent a lot of money on it and they NEED us to buy it so they don't take a loss, so their tactic is to try to force it on us.

It happens to many companies, you start a disruptor and get huge because you did what the market wanted and competitors didn't. Then, later, you don't want the market to go in a direction, so you try to stack the market, never once realizing that another disruptor will come along to upset your apple cart.

You can control some of the market all of the time, and all of the market some of the time, but you can't control all of the market all of the time.

>shaken my already low confidence in OpenAI

No judgment, pure curiosity. Why did you install their malware?

The AI knows better than you what you really, really want, and what you really, really need.

I guess google works in a vaguely similar way, by outputting results based on what it "knows" about you, though in an even more subtly manner.

perplexity is doing something similar, it tried to force install perplexity comet mac edition, into my ipad… and then failed and exited…

they are quite aggressive at making people install this

The only confidence I have in OpenAI at this point is that they will be using scummy tricks like that all the time. What have they ever done to earn confidence in the other direction?

They can't even lie and blame it on a programming fuckup because they'd have to say AI driven code is buggy.

I don't see how OpenAI isn't doomed. They are riding on brand recognition. They are in such a deep hole with investors and despite their meteoric revenue they are only getting deeper. And there is no moat between them and Google or Anthropic or xAI or China for that matter. If Atlas and the video slop machine are their attempts at revenue, they are worse than doomed.

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