mcc
Now that the Bing "AI" has taken away my favorite phone keyboard, I'm thinking about using robots.txt to remove my websites from Bing, in order to prevent incorporation in their AI chat and discourage people from switching to "Bing". But it feels almost pointless because "Bard" is probably going to be forced on us in Google (and probably forced into GBoard, for that matter) sooner rather than later anyway).
Apr 17, 2023 at 9:49pmWeb
Show threadjoëlApr 17, 2023
@mcc the only solace I find in this is that these "AI" text generators are reduced to what they are: a little bit better predictive keyboard. (but I don't want them on my keyboards either)
Show threadmccApr 17, 2023
@jollysea What is especially concerning to me is most of the "AI" services, sometimes with inadequate labeling, are actually transmitting the requests through to "OpenAI", and I do not trust any of my bytes being sent to OpenAI regardless of what claims the TOS makes because I do not trust the people who run it.
Show threadmaya ⛓️Apr 17, 2023
@mcc i therefore removed both 🤷
Show threadJosé PrestonApr 17, 2023
@mcc I just hope things like Bing/Bard continue to pay attention to robots.txt
Show threadgkrnoursApr 18, 2023
@mcc I recently switched to unexpected keyboard. You might have heard of it? I installed from f-droid so it's probably opensource
Show threadmccApr 18, 2023
@gkrnours how's the predictive text?
Show threadgkrnoursApr 18, 2023
@mcc there is none :/ all you get is a keyboard, no interactive area above. There is an option in settings to always display a numbar but I didn't see anything about prediction when I skimmed through the options
Show threadmccApr 18, 2023
@gkrnours okay. This is a must have feature for me
Show threadJohn HarrisApr 18, 2023
@mcc I guess the future is going to be an endless sequence of tech fads foisted on us by big companies against our will.
Show threadmccApr 18, 2023
@rodneylives There was an era that everything was tech companies giving us extremely complex things for free, and that entire time the only reason they were giving it to us for free was they expected someday they'd be able to Extract something from us. That's what's happening here. The future is the bill for everything they claimed to us was free.
Show threadmccApr 18, 2023
@rodneylives …of course, SwiftKey is an interesting case there because before Microsoft bought it it *wasn't free*, and I actually *did pay for it*, but Microsoft made it free anyway because they preferred the business model where you give something away for free and then later use dependence on it to foist unrelated things on people against their will (in this case, including the people who did pay for it)
Show threadBruce IVApr 18, 2023
@mcc ugh, you're probably right, but I hope not; I tried to switch away from GBoard last year when they jammed GIF search into the emoji menu, but eventually gave up and came back (I don't remember which keyboard I gave the longest trial to, but IIRC my issues were substantially-worse swipe recognition, and that the autocomplete suggestions included an arbitrary mix of both languages I had installed, rather than one at a time)