There *has* been a lot of talk about the problems with so-called "AI" but one I don't feel gets enough attention is that "AI" products are surveillance products. "AI" is inevitably run in a cloud service, and in order for the AI to know what to generate some amount of the context within your applicationβ€” usually it's not clear to the user what context, or how muchβ€” has to get sent to the cloud. The more of my local app state that gets transmitted over the Internet, the less comfortable I am.

@mcc Your choices are to either cut yourself off from that or fall behind people who have *effective* (note the emphasis) AI assistance

Personalized services have to know you as well as an equivalent human personal assistant would to be useful.

Again, you can refuse, but you risk being left behind by people who do put it to good use.

Good luck!

@jdrch alternate theory: people using generative AI assistants will fall behind me, because they are using generative AI assistants, which will do a worse job than I (and probably they) can do unaided.

@mcc That's probably true in the near term. In the long term, I wouldn't be so sure.

AI reminds a lot of speech recognition; you need an super high level of accuracy for it not to be frustrating.

Speech recognition used to be terrible. Now it's nearly flawless

@jdrch @mcc have you tried using speech recognition lately? even the best AI like Whisper completely fail on anything other than one person speaking slowly and methodically
not to mention that (English) speech recognition has always been, and still is, biased against people without "normal" (white) accents
@XenonNSMB @mcc Microsoft Teams real-time meeting captions are pretty accurate in my experience