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Comment by rspeele | Hacker News Reader

The worst is Gmail's recent feature to suggest an entire goddamn email that includes cheery little details, doing its best to mimic human pleasantries and small talk. Rather than simply offering "yep/nope" type short replies like it once did, it'll now auto-compose and suggest a multi-paragraph email responding to questions like "How's the family doing?" or "Is your older cat tolerating the new kitten yet?" with completely fabricated saccharine slop.

It's like Clippy pops up and goes "It looks like you're trying to maintain a shred of human connection in an online interaction. Would you like a smiling skinwalker to do that for you instead?"

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The world has a lot of tech journalists, but I have yet to see the longform article, with actual interviews, trying to dig into what is happening in this kind of manic push for features that seem to have no traction with anyone

There are failures in the history of software that come down to believers not realizing that they could never deliver on the promise they were selling, but at least the promise was compelling. But nowadays we are seeing this large orgs try to ship things that could never work. The 1000s of copilots. The hallucinated cat story... The kinds of thing you'd never demo to a serious product-centric exec, because it'd be your last day at the company.

And then there's the current execs, but I guess you'll never find one that will be honest with a journalist here. Can they not see that their product orgs are bankrupt? Whatever Nadella wanted, it sure wasn't the current copilot situation. It's not one product going wrong, but large parts of organizations going in directions that don't pass the smell test. We are in one of the least stable moments in tech since Windows 95 changed winners and losers. The times where malinvestment ruins established companies. How are we seeing basically every large company flailing?

  > CLIPPY: It looks like you're trying to maintain a shred of human connection. Would you like a smiling skinwalker to do that instead??

Thanks for the actual laugh, perfectly sums it up

Sadly, I believe there are some geniuses being paid a half mil a year who are so misguided, they think the only problem is the skinwalker doesn't sound enough like me.

If they can just keep working on it and make sure to train it on all my past emails, it'll be a perfect simulacrum, and its oily token secretions will be impossible for my friends and colleagues to distinguish from my own writing. I'll have one that's just like me and you'll have one that's just like you. And then we can automate away those pesky distractions that occasionally delay us from consuming content perfectly matched to our interests. Won't that be grand?

Well, no. They'd also like to automate watching of content by the AI for you, so you have more time to do the dishes and fold laundry.

Fold? You'll pick coveralls from the daily bin with the other Amazon warehouse picker scum. Now come back to lineup before the cameras dock you three meals again...

You get a feeling some people would send a robot wearing their face to hug their mom if they thought the mom couldn't tell the difference. And to have sex with their wife. It'll happen too which is the sad bit.

> “and to have sex with their wife”

“““One evening he felt the need for a live model and directed his wife to march around the room. “Naked?” she asked hopefully. Lieutenant Scheisskopf smacked his hands over his eyes in exasperation. It was the despair of Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s life to be chained to a woman who was incapable of looking beyond her own dirty, sexual desires to the titanic struggles for the unattainable in which noble man could become heroically engaged. “Why don’t you ever whip me?” she pouted one night. “Because I haven’t the time,” he snapped at her impatiently. “I haven’t the time. Don’t you know there’s a parade going on?”""" - Catch 22, Joseph Heller.

“““All Colonel Cathcart knew about his house in the hills was that he had such a house and hated it. He was never so bored as when spending there the two or three days every other week necessary to sustain the illusion that his damp and drafty stone farmhouse in the hills was a golden palace of carnal delights. Officers’ clubs everywhere pulsated with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and sex orgies there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most beautiful, the most tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily satisfied Italian courtesans, film actresses, models and countesses. No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.""" - also Catch 22, Joseph Heller.

I get so angry about these intrusions. There is nowhere I am more opposed to AI written slop than in my interactions with friends and family.

The iOS keyboard and gmail app are the worst offenders here.

This is hilarious as someone who hasn't used the gmail composition interface in years. I left it to use my own domain, but it seems like I get to enjoy this mess with popcorn too instead of tears.

Well, since about half of the emails you get from your friends are composed by an AI in some way, I hope your popcorn taste real at least.

It's literally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_(2006_film) isn't it?

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