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Evening from Spoons. I may be an AI luddite. I am utterly sick of having it rammed down my throat. A few examples:

1) Accounting platforms where it gives you suggestions for what the transaction may be which are almost always wrong. Takes longer to delete what Quickbooks / Sage / Revolut / Tide have autocompleted than to just do it directly
2) YouTube Studio. I am offered "comment reply suggestions" to most comments left on my channel. Can't switch this feature off, uses screen space, especially on mobile
3) Have just completed a trial of Monday.com for my business. Spent c. 8 hours on it, plus a few more doing planning etc. Trial about to expire so lets set our subscription. Not only do they force you to pay for users you don't have, you must buy AI tokens for those people you don't have. And in 2 weeks the number of AI tokens we have used on trial is zero. A cost increase of 50%. And of course you can't opt out. Other than binning the entire platform which we have now done
4) Microsoft won't let you remove Copilot. Endless intrusion on apps like Powerpoint, even down to the minor irritation of having to dock the logo thing so its not on the slides I am working on. WhatsApp won't even let you do that - the Meta AI symbol takes up screen space and you can't remove it

I'm being driven mad by AI. Please make it go away.

It's almost like they've forgotten all the lessons they (should have) learnt from the infuriating paperclip 20 odd years ago.

What would be funny is if all the companies competing to spend the most on AI models and datacentres go through all this, and then it turns out to be pretty easy and cheap (relatively) to create new ones to compete, meaning the big boys cannot reap the rewards anywhere near as much as they think they will as they won't be able to dominate.

Evening from Spoons. I may be an AI luddite. I am utterly sick of having it rammed down my throat. A few examples:

1) Accounting platforms where it gives you suggestions for what the transaction may be which are almost always wrong. Takes longer to delete what Quickbooks / Sage / Revolut / Tide have autocompleted than to just do it directly
2) YouTube Studio. I am offered "comment reply suggestions" to most comments left on my channel. Can't switch this feature off, uses screen space, especially on mobile
3) Have just completed a trial of Monday.com for my business. Spent c. 8 hours on it, plus a few more doing planning etc. Trial about to expire so lets set our subscription. Not only do they force you to pay for users you don't have, you must buy AI tokens for those people you don't have. And in 2 weeks the number of AI tokens we have used on trial is zero. A cost increase of 50%. And of course you can't opt out. Other than binning the entire platform which we have now done
4) Microsoft won't let you remove Copilot. Endless intrusion on apps like Powerpoint, even down to the minor irritation of having to dock the logo thing so its not on the slides I am working on. WhatsApp won't even let you do that - the Meta AI symbol takes up screen space and you can't remove it

I'm being driven mad by AI. Please make it go away.

My pet hate is when I get a long pdf of the accounts for the charities that I am Trustee of. The AI comments that it is a long document and would I want a one page summary. The answer is No, I want the detail.

I am yet to find AI useful for anything yet it is drowning us in slop, that gets in the way of real content.

I did get some use out of AI the other day in figuring our steps to make an old game which has not been maintained work, as the answer is usually buried in some ancient reddit thread somewhere, but that's mainly a consequence of Google Search actually being pretty shit now (the consequences of monopoly perhaps) and the AI search actually being functional.

Google is now deliberately shit. They know that if you find your search result quickly then you aren't looking at their adverts for long. If they string you along with poor results and paid for placings they get more adverts.

They must rely on people like Peter Murrell.

- We see you just bought a kettle. Would you be interested buying another kettle?
- Yes please!

Evening from Spoons. I may be an AI luddite. I am utterly sick of having it rammed down my throat. A few examples:

1) Accounting platforms where it gives you suggestions for what the transaction may be which are almost always wrong. Takes longer to delete what Quickbooks / Sage / Revolut / Tide have autocompleted than to just do it directly
2) YouTube Studio. I am offered "comment reply suggestions" to most comments left on my channel. Can't switch this feature off, uses screen space, especially on mobile
3) Have just completed a trial of Monday.com for my business. Spent c. 8 hours on it, plus a few more doing planning etc. Trial about to expire so lets set our subscription. Not only do they force you to pay for users you don't have, you must buy AI tokens for those people you don't have. And in 2 weeks the number of AI tokens we have used on trial is zero. A cost increase of 50%. And of course you can't opt out. Other than binning the entire platform which we have now done
4) Microsoft won't let you remove Copilot. Endless intrusion on apps like Powerpoint, even down to the minor irritation of having to dock the logo thing so its not on the slides I am working on. WhatsApp won't even let you do that - the Meta AI symbol takes up screen space and you can't remove it

I'm being driven mad by AI. Please make it go away.

That's the big issue, AI is good at some things but it's being forced into areas where it's just a pain in the arse and adds no value. Microsoft at least has started to reverse this and is steadily removing most of the pointless Copilot integration.

As for it going away, well OpenAI lost $34bn last year, $20bn of that just on general operations. They are a financial basket case, and Anthropic is little better.

There is a bit of a grassroots pushback over here on social media telling restaurants and similar to stop using AI for their photos and posts as it’s obvious and people want to see the actual food as done and frankly it would possibly/likely look better.

Authenticity might limit AI in a lot of areas. Music too - AI might produce the odd good tune but I think people still like the idea of people making and performing music.

Evening from Spoons. I may be an AI luddite. I am utterly sick of having it rammed down my throat. A few examples:

1) Accounting platforms where it gives you suggestions for what the transaction may be which are almost always wrong. Takes longer to delete what Quickbooks / Sage / Revolut / Tide have autocompleted than to just do it directly
2) YouTube Studio. I am offered "comment reply suggestions" to most comments left on my channel. Can't switch this feature off, uses screen space, especially on mobile
3) Have just completed a trial of Monday.com for my business. Spent c. 8 hours on it, plus a few more doing planning etc. Trial about to expire so lets set our subscription. Not only do they force you to pay for users you don't have, you must buy AI tokens for those people you don't have. And in 2 weeks the number of AI tokens we have used on trial is zero. A cost increase of 50%. And of course you can't opt out. Other than binning the entire platform which we have now done
4) Microsoft won't let you remove Copilot. Endless intrusion on apps like Powerpoint, even down to the minor irritation of having to dock the logo thing so its not on the slides I am working on. WhatsApp won't even let you do that - the Meta AI symbol takes up screen space and you can't remove it

I'm being driven mad by AI. Please make it go away.

My pet hate is when I get a long pdf of the accounts for the charities that I am Trustee of. The AI comments that it is a long document and would I want a one page summary. The answer is No, I want the detail.

I am yet to find AI useful for anything yet it is drowning us in slop, that gets in the way of real content.

I did get some use out of AI the other day in figuring our steps to make an old game which has not been maintained work, as the answer is usually buried in some ancient reddit thread somewhere, but that's mainly a consequence of Google Search actually being pretty shit now (the consequences of monopoly perhaps) and the AI search actually being functional.

Google is now deliberately shit. They know that if you find your search result quickly then you aren't looking at their adverts for long. If they string you along with poor results and paid for placings they get more adverts.