Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.

What book store will stock AI slop that no-one wants to buy?

They’re not trying to satisfy customers: they’re answering shareholders. Our system is no longer about offering the best products, it’s about having the market share to force people to do business with you or maybe two other equally bad companies that constantly look for ways to extract more money from people to make shareholders happy. See: Two choices of smartphone OS, ISP regional monopolies or duopolies, two consumer OSes, a handful of mobile carriers, almost all available TVs models being “smart TVs” laden with spyware…

(I’m speaking from the US perspective, this may not be as pronounced elsewhere.)

The reality is that most people like many of the things you or I might find useless or annoying.

There are better products, but they are niche. You pay more for a non-smart TV because 1) there’s less demand, and 2) the business model is different and requires full payment up front rather than long term monetization.

But who are you or I to look at the market and declare that both sellers and buyers are wrong about what they want? I’m very suspicious of any position as paternalistic as that.

The answer to this is regulation. See: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/apple-updates-app-...

Outside of a monopoly the best way to extract more money from people is to offer a better product. If AI is being forced and people do hate it, they'll move towards products that don't do that

What happened to Windows Recall being enabled by default? Surely it was in Microsoft's best interest to force it on people. But no, they reversed it after a huge backlash. You see this again and again

Of your examples, ISPs are the only one I can see that's hated without other options. Most people are quite happy with Windows/Mac/Android/iOS/Mint Mobile/Smart-TV-With-No-Internet-Access

It's fun to say "let's go write a complete replacement for Microsoft Office" or the Adobe suite or what have you, but that has a truly astonishing upfront cost to get to a point where it's even servicing 50% of the use cases, let alone 95 or 99%.

Or there's other examples where it's not obvious there's sufficient interest to finance an alternative - how many people are going to pay for something that replicates solely the old functionality of Microsoft Paint or Notepad, for example.

My guess is you'd very quickly get a bunch of teams scrambling to produce something to compete and capture a huge market by charging a tenth the price. Funding is taken care of when winning there is worth so much

Maybe it won't happen overnight because they're huge software suites.. but it will happen. We need regulations to take care of anti-competitive practices - but after that the market seems to work pretty well for keeping companies in check

If all of the factory owners discover a type of widget to sell that can incidentally drive down wages the more units they move, it's unlikely for consumers to be provided much choice in their future widgets.

$30 blenders that break in 3 months haven't bankrupted Vitamix

If quality were a sufficiently motivating aspect, Google's deteriorating search wouldn't be a constant theme on this site, and people on the street would know where to download and play a FLAC file.

There's also a segment of the market that wants the FLAC, premium handcrafted experiences at top price. They're not in direct competition and both can co-exist

My initial point was that companies can't just exploit consumers relentlessly because the market won't let them. The good value option can't just box people in and show them only ads. I bet YouTube would love to show you unskippable ads for 75% of the video length. Good luck staying market leader with that

I don't think Google is a good example here. They've been actively trying to fight and failing against SEO and affiliate spam for a decade. No-one else has solved that problem either which is why Google remains at the top. I personally had a hand-crafted content site thrown out of their search results because of them going after spam

Six-plus months ago they put a chatbot in the bottom right corner of their website that literally covers up buttons I use all the time for ordering, so that I have to scroll now in order to access those controls (Chrome, MacOS). After testing it with various queries it only seems to provide answers to questions in their pre-existing support documentation.

This is not about choice (see above, they are the only game in town), and it is not about entitlement (we're a tiny shop trying to serve our customers' often obscure book requests). They seemed to literally place the chatbot buttons onto their website with no polling of their users. This is an anecdotal report about Ingram specifically.

That's objective; subjectively, it feels like there are individuals who were given the ability to "try new stuff" and "break things" who chose to follow the hype around features that look like this. The chat button seems to me to be an exercise in following-the-herd which actually sucks for me as a user with it blocking my old buttons.

I don't think it's entitlement to make a well-mannered complaint about how little choice we actually have when it comes to the whims of the tech giants.

The OP's point is that increasingly, we don't have that choice, for example, because AI slop masquerades as if it were authored by human beings (that's, in fact, its purpose!), or because the software applications you rely on suddenly start pushing "AI companions" on you, whether you want them or not, or because you have no viable alternatives to the software applications you use, so you must put up with those "AI companions," whether you want them in your life or not.

Probably no one enjoys AI books though. I did my best at devils advocate on that above.

Politicians often use AI to summarise proposals and amendments to the laws. And later vote based on those summaries. It's incredible how artifical bureaucracy is driven by artifical intelligence. And how citizens don't care to follow artificial laws that ruins humanity.

The whole point is that "just don't buy it" as a strategy doesn't work anymore for consumers to guide the market when the companies have employed the rock-for-dessert gambit to avoid having to try to sell their products on their merits.

It's ridiculous to compare bad human books with bad AI books because there many human books which are life-changing, but there isn't a single AI book which isn't trash.