Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to Its New AI Assistant | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to Its New AI Assistant

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66 pointscdrnsf123 comments

Scout sounds like an excitable little dog that runs headlong into trees when trying to catch a frisbee.

Given Microsoft's long history of failure with personal assistants I'm looking forward to this one! Clippy, Cortana, Copilot! Wasn't an animated dog called rover one of these way back? The best of all was unquestionably Ms. Dewey for Microsoft Windows Live Search who is almost forgotten.

I thought his name was Watson (the dog assistant).

Edit: I was wrong. But there is "Power Pup" and apparently Will Shakespeare

It was Rover

Power pup was the superdog. Rocky was the normal dog.

(I was way too into the building apps with the assistant framework as a kid...)

Don't forget about Tay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Shit, that was 10 years ago already? Feels more recent, also in terms of technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

You can go straight to hell for making me feel old.

As a kid I absolutely loved these interfaces.

it was a knockoff of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap

I still do, honestly.

guess who is reusing that name?

https://bob.ibm.com/

I saw IBMers wearing shirts with it at the moscone center this week at the snowflake event.

Don't forget Sydney! No, no no, do not forget Sydney. We do not like people who forget Sydney, we do not, do we?

Microsoft can't learn a thing from their own history. Perhaps if they made a product that was useful and not deceiving their users they'd have more success. It seems they aren't capable of that anymore.

Making a useful product is far more difficult than tapping into our base desires as human beings. Microsoft hasn't been an innovative company in a long time and that's by design.

They are also just bad at almost everything they do. I'd really be worried if a competent company was trying to make people addicted.

Although maybe it doesn't take much, given that it sounded at one point like the Microsoft execs were addicted already.

I'd really be worried if a competent company was trying to make people addicted. This is absolutely a thing. Social media, mobile games, LLMs, tobacco.

Oh yes sorry. I meant addicted to AI. No doubt they are, though, anyway.

> They are also just bad at almost everything they do

Huh? Have you forgotten Clippy, the first AI agent?

They're those guys that spend hundreds of hours in pickup artist courses rather than being a person people would like to be with, yeah.

That’s always been Microsoft in a nutshell though. They constantly stumble around never making anything truly great but still doing a good enough job to keep their existing customers.

Original builders are all gone so they are just skiing on what they have built. And this the result.

Maybe trying to engineer addiction is what should be illegal, and if you want to question "how do you define whether something is addictive" you don't need an objective measure: you determine whether it seems like the people making the product seem to think that's their goal.

"you know it when you see it"

More demonstrating intent

I guess I worded that poorly; it isn't merely that we don't need an objective measure: we literally don't need a measure at all, as the crime would be attempting to cause it, whether or not it was even possible to do, and so we simply do not care if the activity was addictive. If you are going out of your way to exploit the psychology or physiology of other humans in an attempt to use that to sell your product, maybe that is what should be illegal.

This would then mean that "our expert witness has strong evidence that my client's product area is not 'addictive', so my client could not ever be said to be engineering addiction" would not be a defense any more than "the plan my client came up with to kill their alleged victim could not possibly have worked, so my client can not be charged with attempted murder" is (at least generally, afaik) not a defense.

This just shifts the question to: what counts as attempt to cause an addiction?

Does writing a book aims to make people read addictive? Try to design a gym class that makes you feel good about yourself so you will come again?

You still need to define what is addictive

The above phrasing, an attempt to "exploit the psychology or physiology of others", works fine. It's a form of fraud, or scamming. Is an attempted scam a crime? I guess probably not, oh well.

I don't believe devices are addictive, but that's irrelevant to Satya Nadella believing it and trying to exploit it and thus being a scammer.

It's going to get fuzzy around whether entertaining somebody counts as exploiting their psychology. Obviously it doesn't, but that would rest on reasonably assumed consent.

※ People do get sentenced for attempted fraud, but that's for more blatant things like trying to extract money from an unwitting victim's bank account, rather than just saying "we must figure out how to commit some fraud".

Ok, fair, so, to try to apply this to my analogous crime: I would agree that attempted murder does need a definition of "murder"; but, the crime does not care whether your specific plan would have led to an act of murder, only whether or not the defendant was trying to murder.

We thereby do not necessarily need a way to know whether reading--either your book or any book--is addictive or not, but only the extent to which you were going out of your way to make it addictive, for which I think it might then be OK to have some specific-yet-contrived definition that is difficult to apply to any specific product but feels like a wrong thing to do (maybe my "exploit human psychology or physiology")?

Shockingly, a huge amount of human behavior cannot be strictly defined and is best evaluated with situational, subjective judgement. Crazy.

This why have the "reasonable person", a legal fiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person

This applies to any business that wants a repeat customer.

You are right! We should regulate all businesses the same way.

You’re implying there’s no distinction between addiction and use. And I think you’re excessive cynicism is just wrong in practical ways,

I always buy my nails from Home Depot. I’m not addicted to nails. Home Depot does not reasonably think they can get me addicted to nails.

> I always buy my nails from Home Depot.

It's probably not the nails, but there's a reason people always stick with a particular hardware store.

(Also, I know that's a flip example, but there are absolutely brands of nails and screws I always get).

But do you go out and buy nails and screws just for fun when you’re not working on a hardware project? Do you think Home Depot’s marketing suggests you should be building day in and day out? That the average person should have five projects going at the same time and compulsively start a new project even when they’re not feeling like it?

Addiction is a real thing with a real definition and real consequences and it’s not the same as love or admiration or even fanaticism.

If you look up the medical definition of addiction I think you'll be surprised to see that in order for it to be considered a disorder the key is that is has to be past the point of self-abuse or adverse consequences.

You can say something is "addictive" without implying it's a substance abuse disorder.

When people at Microsoft say the goal of AI is to be addictive, they're clearly implying that they want their product to be habit forming in the same way that video games or food delivery is. And it's silly to imply Microsoft is trying to create physiological dependence.

> And it's silly to imply Microsoft is trying to create physiological dependence.

I really truly, madly, deeply, in the big picture of this, think that you’re wrong. They could choose a different word and they don’t. We could debate the nuances and their are multitudes, but I think the actions of the industry align themselves much more with the accurate definition of addiction then something else.

I would argue that intent should not even matter. Whatever punishment/consequences are deemed appropriate, they should apply based on the system's actual exploitation of addictive tendencies in humans. Otherwise you're just incentivizing people to get better at covering their tracks.

"We forced all the employees into AI, and now apparently, our internal AI usage is high; this means this project will get high usage from general consumers."

When your dogfood is really an opiate, you might have a problem.

It‘s not an opiate, it‘s salvia divinorum or rather something even more awful like diphenhydramin.

Psychonaut wiki:

Notably, it is frequently reported to produce significant nausea and bodily discomfort ("body load"). Most people who try diphenhydramine do not report positive effects and do not wish to repeat the experience.

It is generally considered to have low abuse potential due to its dysphoric effects.

Benadryl?

Step 1: make copilot in window actually useful.

Literally every company on the planet would jump at the chance for their product to be addictive.

Who'd've guessed that the profit motive being the primary if not sole concern would sometimes (often) create incentives that are hostile to humanity.

Yeah but you’re not supposed to say it out loud. The bigger part of this story is Nadella saying (paraphrased) that he has no clue who wrote the document and that guy should look for a new job.

Imagine a world where every car company would get money every time someone uses their car.

Instead of monthly subscription for self driving or heated seat, it would just cost a few cents a minute.

This would be a strong push to try to destroy public transportation everywhere

>Imagine a world where every car company would get money every time someone uses their car.

So oil companies? Moreover car companies do get more money with more car use. More driving means more parts required, more servicing needed (from their dealership network), and cars that need to be replaced sooner. It's not as instantaneous as uber charging your card every time you do a ride, but I don't see how that makes a material difference.

They don't get everything, spare parts are made by other companies, same with tires, servicing can be done outside their network...

Microsoft handles more verticality.

I don't think that's actually true. Heck, from my own experience, I can definitively say it's not actually true. I've worked in several organizations where I helped create and sell products whose job was to provide value, then let people get on with their day. I wouldn't have worked at those places otherwise.

Not saying that intended addictiveness is not common, but let's not normalize corporate sociopathy.

That's because your employer doesn't think they can ever be addictive.

No, it was because they weren't supposed to be. They were fulfilling an actual need and creating value in a way that wasn't intended to be addictive. And I was a co-founder of some of those orgs and products, so it wasn't about my employer.

I know it's hard to believe that not every organization is sociopathic, because many are (the larger, the more likely to be). But not every one is.

I think the most disturbing aspect of HN is how so many people seem to believe that anti-social behavior is rational. There is this weird dichotomy that you are either a money hungry behemoth or destitute out on the street. My company is a not-for-profit, we put our revenue back into the local community, our employees make a great living and we still have year over year growth.

Evidence that anti-social behavior is rational can be seen in all the successful anti-social people, like Elon, Donald, Jeffrey and William.

Maybe rational is the wrong word. I think I mean aspirational.

Only if your definition of "success" consists solely of accumulating wealth. Many people use a different definition.

If your boss could quadruple sales by making the product addictive and that was easy, I guarantee he would. So would you if you weren't paid a fixed salary.

No that’s just the goal of bad companies. I work for a company that does not, in fact, want our product to be addictive. We want our product to help people. Stop normalizing this behavior as ‘just business’ and start calling out bad people for what they are.

Name and praise?