Last week, Copilot made an unsolicited appearance in Microsoft 365. This week, Apple turned on Apple Intelligence by default in its upcoming operating system releases. And it isn’t easy to get through any of Google’s services without stumbling over Gemini.
Regulators worldwide are keen to ensure that marketing and similar services are opt-in. When dark patterns are used to steer users in one direction or another, lawmakers pay close attention.
But, for some reason, forcing AI on customers is acceptable. Rather than asking “we’re going to shovel a load of AI services into your apps that you never asked for, but our investors really need you to use, is this OK?” the assumption instead is that users will be delighted to see their formerly pristine applications cluttered with AI features.
Customers have not asked for any of this. There has been no clamoring for search summaries, no pent-up demand for the revival of a jumped-up Clippy. There is no desire to wreak further havoc on the environment to get an almost-correct recipe for tomato soup. And yet here we are, ready or not.
Without a choice to opt in, the beatings will continue until AI adoption improves or users find that pesky opt-out option.
Correct. It’s about metrics. They’re making AI opt-out because they desparately need to pump user engagement numbers, even if those numbers don’t mean anything.
It’s all for the shareholders. Big tech has been, for a while now, chasing a new avenue for meteoric growth, because that’s what investors have come to expect. So they went all in on AI, to the tune of billions upon billions, and came crashing, hard, into the reality that consumers don’t need it and enterprise can’t use it;
Transformer models have two fatal flaws; the hallucination problem - to which there is still no solution - makes them unsuitable for enterprise applications, and their cost per operation make them unaffordable for retail customer applications (ie, a chatbot that gives you synonyms while you write is the sort of thing people will happily use, but won’t pay $40 a month for).
So now the C-suites are standing over the edge of the burning trash fire they pushed all that money into, knowing that at any moment their shareholders are going to wake up and shove them into it too. They’ve got to come up with some kind of proof that this investment is paying off. They can’t find that proof in sales, because no one is buying, so instead they’re going to use “engagement”; shove AI into everything, to the point where people basically wind up using it by accident, then use those metrics to claim that everyone loves it. And then pray to God that one of those two fatal flaws will be solved in time to make their investments pay off in the long run.