I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it
91 comments
·October 26, 2025edoceo
ajkjk
It's just so... disrespectful.
The reason they do it, of course, is that some subset of the company has AI-related metrics they want to hit, and getting you to click that button is how they do that.
Which is so backwards. Of course, in the first place, a lot of these are free products, so it's not surprising that changes in the product benefit the company instead of you. But there is still supposed to be a modicum of respect: features should be there for you to use if you need them, not trying to get your addition and screaming "use me!". The stupid AI metric they're trying to hit isn't even real or beneficial to them; it's fake wallstreet crap because all the management lives in the same AI bubble and it looks good to say your feature got adopted. But the stupid feature isn't even useful or good. Probably decent documentation would be far better. And you just know the button wiggles on the paid version too, they don't give a shit.
This whole industry is conveniently abstracted away from its users by an app or a website, or whatever, so it manages to get away with treating the users like statistics instead of people. It's so disgusting, that the whole world is being taken over by this. Working at a company that does this should be a source of shame. "Manipulating your users" is a vile bottom-of-the-barrel business model. Fortunately everyone also sucks at it so it's still possible, for the most part, to ignore them (social media feeds being the notable counterexample). But it's just such a shitty world to live in.
If a real person did this stuff to your face--selling you something and then wiggling useless features at you out of the corner of your eye forever--you'd curse them out and try to never do business with them again. That's how it should be when a tech company does it, too.
clumsysmurf
Even though I don't use Gemini, I have a permanent Gemini 'FAB' located above the 'Start Chat' FAB in Android / Google Messages and I can't seem to get rid of it.
Material 3 guidelines say "Don't display multiple FABs on a single screen".
jasongill
For those like me who didn't know what a FAB is, it stands for "Floating Action Button", which is intended to be the primary action for a page
tomnipotent
Google Sheets now has an intrusive Gemini pop-up that obscures other cells and UI when you try to do things like edit a formula, it's beyond infuriating and I can feel my blood pressure rise just thinking about it.
quamserena
I blocked that with uBlock origin the moment I first saw it. So annoying! Someone should make a filter for all of these AI widgets.
pea
The way Gemini (which is incredible) has been haphazardly shoved into gsuite products seems devoid of any kind of common sense. Even very basic obvious things via Gemini in Gmail fail. It’s ironic because it’s the one place I’d love a decent model.
SturgeonsLaw
Incredible at some things maybe, but for the average user Gemini is what broke Google Assistant (the article touches on that). Most people use Google Assistant to "do things" like play music, interact with smart switches, etc. Rolling out Gemini as a replacement before it could do these things was always going to be viewed as a regression.
People don't care if it can answer questions with more nuance when the smart stuff they paid hundreds or thousands for no longer works.
wlesieutre
Reminds me of when Google Plus got “integrated” everywhere, but even worse.
If we take the thing nobody asked for and shove it in users faces as often as possible, this will get lots of happy customers and the product will take off!
rapind
Clippy!
grebc
I changed my home setup to MX Linux a couple of months ago.
The PC is so damn snappy compared to Win10 with all the garbage updates. I don’t want widgets on my Lock Screen. I don’t want to know about Candy Crush when I open the Start Menu. And I definitely do not want to use Edge, Firefox is fine thanks. Let alone the AI BS set for Win11.
tombert
I have been trying for about a month to get my parents to move to Linux, after my mom got an automatic update that bricked her computer [1]. I've tried very hard to explain to them that their computers would likely run faster if they moved to Linux Mint or something, with the added bonus that you won't have stuff constantly monitoring everything you're doing and and spitting ads at you.
Sadly, this has been in vain; my parents are convinced that it will be "too hard" and I guess that having to call me and have me walk them through wiping their hard drive whenever Windows Update [2] decides that they'd prefer my mom buy a new laptop is somehow "easier". A part of me wants to create an ultimatum and say "I will not play tech support anymore unless you move to Linux or macOS", but I know they would call my bluff and ultimately I would end up caving.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601144
[2] If anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider a career in literally anything else. Software development clearly isn't for you. There are many other positions out there and I suspect you'd be better at nearly any of them than you are at writing software.
quamserena
Meh, Linux Mint has some serious rough edges from my experience. Suspend doesn’t work if multiple users are logged in, save-as dialog windows open under the current window (a 7-year old bug!!!) [0], audio devices are not shared between users, some drives don't mount on boot, etc. These problems are probably fixable if you have the know-how but it isn't great for the tech illiterate.
That being said, I have never had kernel panics or opened my computer to find a corrupted OS after a bad update (unlike Windows), so there's that.
[0] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/issues/137
tombert
I am not sure my parents have ever had multiple accounts on any of their computers, so I don’t think that particular suspend bug would be an issue, and I haven’t encountered the save as dialog bug, though I don’t dispute that it happens (I just don’t run Gnome or Cinnamon anymore).
Even still, even if it does require a tech-literate person to fix, they have access to that by me, and I can likely fix it for them in a few minutes with tmate or something, as opposed to Windows Update bricking the computer, which required basically an entire day from me to fix.
Oh, and if an update does cause an issue, Linux has competent snapshotting tools because they have filesystems that didn’t coexist with dinosaurs and as such if something breaks a fix is a reboot (and probably a twenty minute phone call with me) away. On Ubuntu if you install ZFS on root you can configure it to take an auto snapshot before updates, for example.
ekianjo
> save-as dialog windows open under the current window (a 7-year old bug!!!)
This probably does not affect everyone because I have never seen this issue in Mint
grogenaut
I couldn't get my spouse to try till her computer died, I installed it and said try for a day, I had to use linux to fix the computer (not a lie). See how it goes. She's a gimp wizard now (odd sentence). And very flexible on oses. The only killer app for her is excel on windows. "mac excel is crap". yes honey, yes it is.
tombert
I don’t know enough about the advanced parts of Excel so I am a little curious; is the browser version of Excel crappy?
XorNot
Has she tried LibreOffice Calc?
ekianjo
You don't need to get their permission. Just install Linux (mint or any other flavor) and they will get used to it. Did this for a bunch of family members and after a few weeks of transition nobody ever complained after
bee_rider
Did they not complain because nobody in your family talks to you anymore?
tombert
I live several states away from them, so unless I manage to sneak in some elaborate KVM switch and abuse it in the rare time my mom is plugged into her desk, I don’t think that’s viable.
I suppose I could do it when I come down and visit when they’re not looking, though I think they would be pretty pissed if I did that.
barbs
Agreed. Find a distro that most looks like their current setup (maybe Zorin OS?), customize it so it has all the app icons and bookmarks etc in the same position as their Windows set up, and just leave them to it.
If you don't want to be sneaky about it, just install it next time Windows craps itself.
righthand
Do the ultimatum or force them onto it. They will thank you later.
tombert
The problem is that even if i did manage to install it on their computer, I don’t think they would just get used to it, they would bitch at me and then just go to Best Buy and purchase a new computer.
lstodd
Just force. Install linux and find an excuse like you'll do windows next week because reasons. Works wonders.
NicoJuicy
I always try to convince people that by staying in the same thing for longer, eventually they will need to switch and everything will be much harder.
The brain needs to stay flexible.
Good luck
ProllyInfamous
I prepared for EoLwin10 by installing Ubuntu on my older dual Xeon / VEGA64 tower. First time Linux user.
This computer is fast again.
I went with Ubuntu because it has one-click GPT support, even for an old blue-collar novice like me I can do it. So can you.
Next it'll be time to retire the fantastic'est Core2Duo Windows 7 Pro 64-bit -computer you ever did see... but only when it dies of natural causes.
frontfor
Same here. I’ve recently switched back to Fedora after a long time on Windows. There are so much less distractions on Fedora and I really hope that it stays this way forever.
add-sub-mul-div
I don't know about Windows 10 but in Windows 11 all of that, like the other stuff people complain about, can be easily disabled.
mattgreenrocks
Having an OS that doesn’t feel trashy by default should be an incredibly low bar to clear, but alas.
technion
Half these "disable junk" settings auto revert after every update .
And then you have people regularly showing up in threads saying they ran a "debloat" script and now its impossible to run teams and the fix is "rebuild the os". None of this is as simple or risk free as it could be.
malfist
Easily disabled, and then a week later, easily disabled and then a week later easily disabled and then a week later easily disabled.
Insanity
Yeah but the “out of the box” experience tells you a lot about a product imo.
I use windows only when I play a game, and wouldn’t touch it otherwise
gdulli
It took me longer to figure out how to disable the Ubuntu motd ads than the ones in Windows but I didn't get outraged about it, I just set it up the way I wanted and moved on.
chasing0entropy
Investigate ARM / Android gaming scene - it's not your dad's clunky stuff any more - most ARM native games are faster, lightweight, and optimized for touch/vr. ARM console emulation is also on point.
mimikatz
My nest to Google Home got "updated". I just to ask hey google what is the thermostat set to and it would tell me 70-whatever degrees. Now after the update it tells me it is set to cool. Not that helpful, I have to ask, hey google what temperature is the thermostat set to, which is longer and I find annoying specific
tqi
> Forums and communities are losing authentic voices... The comments under most tweets follow the same robotic tone, and it's obvious that a lot of them exist only to farm engagement.
AI isn't making it better, but tbh most of the author's complaints have been a problem since well before LLMs. Engagement bait is profitable, and an internet that connects 8 billion people will always trend toward monoculture.
Gigachad
Making a problem 100x worse is still quite notable even if social media was always slop. Half of reddit posts these days are ChatGPT written where OP replies to nothing.
ronbenton
Cram it in everything, make a press release for the stockholders, and see what sticks.
Microsoft is a particularly bad offender with copilot nonsense popping up all over the place. But hoo boy look at that stock price
BewareTheYiga
superultra
Thank you. Had to turn off my blocker for that site, I was drowning in pop-ups
quantummagic
If you happen to use Firefox, check out "Reader View" (it's a button that appears at the end of the address bar). It works brilliantly to strip away everything except the main text of the article; and present it in a font, at a point size, and with margins, of your choosing.
webdevver
kind of funny that an article bashing on "drowning in AI" is itself drowning in the far more insidious web affliction of ads and popups
tombert
> > Forums and communities are losing authentic voices... The comments under most tweets follow the same robotic tone, and it's obvious that a lot of them exist only to farm engagement.
I've mentioned this before, but I still think that part of the reason Something Awful was and is still fun really boils down to the fact that it cost money to join. It's not a lot of money, but enough to where it keeps bot traffic pretty low (since it would quickly get expensive to keep buying accounts as they get banned). This, in combination with the fact that there's not really a huge benefit to getting engagement other than "it's fun to be funny", and the moderators willingness to ban/probe people who make the forum un-fun, and it's become basically the only social media that I use.
I'm not quite a total boomer, I do understand the appeal of social networks like Twitter or Instagram, but I kind of think that ML recommendation systems are sort of by definition antithetical to anything good. It's not like anything a YouTube or TikTok recommendation gives me is going to meaningfully improve my life, and if these systems work as intended then all they do is make me waste more time than I would normally.
cal_dent
Agreed. It seems inevitable to me that the only valid social networks (social media or forum) will be some sort of semi-locked/curated kingdoms. As bot traffic and engagement increases on the Web the appeal surely starts to decline? Especially as users become better as spotting the less sophisticated bots seem to increasingly dominate a lot of activity.
Is the Internet still fun/addictive if you're not actually engaging with people anymore?
tombert
Yeah, there's a bit of brilliance in the $10 fee for SA. It's not really enough to "exclude" anyone; virtually anyone can afford to pay a one-time fee, but if they keep getting banned and having to buy accounts, then it becomes untenable to create spam. The genius is that this didn't require teams of PhDs coming up with an elaborate Machine Learning system, it exploited the most basic of human instincts: loss aversion.
SA is just about perfect for me, since it has enough users to avoid the "dead mall" vibe, but it's still a relatively small community.
blt
Yes. Generative AI is bad. Most of the general population already realizes it. Only the tech and computer science bubble remains optimistic.
cookie_monsta
The (non-tech) industry I am in generates an enormous amount of text that it's fairly certain nobody reads past the executive summary.
My workmates love it. Amongst the tech community, I see a divide very similar to the crypto one - everybody who has a stake in it succeeding is very optimistic. Everybody working in other areas seems dubious at best.
jordanb
Literally every conversation that I am in or hear about AI outside of tech circles (and most of them inside) are negative.
Is there any technology in recent memory where the greator public has turned so universally against it?
Gigachad
I don't think any tech has ever been pushed so hard in front of people so fast. People hated facebook for ages but you could just not use it. While these AI features are shoved in front of your face constantly. Google sticks them at the top of every search, reddit sticks generated slop on every page, every SaaS has rebranded themselves as an AI tool with constant popups telling you to use the new AI feature.
Most other crappy tech you could just choose to not use.
BeFlatXIII
What bubble are you living in where it's universal and not mostly apathetic?
amitav1
I don't think that this is tree. I'm a high school student, and I've overheard quite a few conversations between our admin about whether they prefer Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT.
filchermcurr
That may not be because they like it but because they're required to use it. The teachers in my area, at least, are mandated to use AI themselves and integrate it into their curriculum.
null
muldvarp
I think people in the cs bubble will be optimistic up until it directly affects them by destroying software engineering as a (good) career.
Insanity
What do you mean by tech and compsci bubble? Many of the software engineers I interact with don’t seem all that optimistic or positive about the AI tools. There are bubbles for either side I think.
But I’m one of those who hasn’t had great experiences using them for anything beyond toy projects.. so maybe my bubble falls more on the AI skeptic side.
PeterHolzwarth
I will grudgingly admit that some AI features I encounter are kind of useful.
At work, we of course are all-in on a large wiki (Confluence). It has a feature irritatingly overlayed that treats searches as AI questions the provided LLM will answer. I have to admit it often does a good job answering my effective question directly, vs me going through many semi-related pages trying to find out how to do something.
Ours is a Windows shop, and I find I am using Copilot somewhat more frequently instead of web searches to find answers to "how do I ..." questions related to the commercial tools we use. While the responses are not always perfect, they are often-enough accurate enough to be useful. And, it saves me a lot of time vs digging through, ironically enough, AI-generated slop pages of how to's that take ten feet of page to answer a simple damned question.
pogue
I loathe the loss of human customer service and moderation (of social media, online gaming, etc) to AI. I constantly hear reports of AI misidentifying speech in in-game chat that results in people getting banned. As well as getting randomly banned/flagged on social media for "community guidelines" or some other esoteric nonsense.
Then, of course, when you attempt to contact said company's customer service, there is none to be had. Only chat bots that not only cannot solve your issue, but can give you inaccurate information. So, what do you do then? There's nothing to be done, you're stuck in an indefinite limbo of customer service purgatory, only being able to guess at what to do.
I, myself, was banned off Instagram. I had a private account, so all I did was view other people's posts and occasionally left comments on their posts, never anything obnoxious or rude. Out of the blue, I received an email telling me my account was suspended and I needed to verify myself by giving them my phone number to get an SMS, check a reCAPTCHA box, and send a selfie to show I was human. I did that and it said I would be unsuspended within an hour, but I got an email stating "We reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Standards. As a result, your account has been permanently disabled."
Of course, there's no one to follow up with and I'm left racking my brain trying to figure out what I could have done to cause this. Did I reply to someone inappropriately? Was it because I was using a VPN? What could I have possibly done?
We've seen that some people who have been banned on social media find that, essentially the only way to get unbanned was to know someone at Meta [1] or get your story published in the media to get their attention [2] or even resort to SLEEPING with Meta employee(s) to get your account issues resolved [3].
Alternately, some Meta employees have turned unbanning people into a side gig [4] [5] as they know that there is no legitimate way to get your account back. When I inquired about this on Reddit, I was pointed to a site that showed offers of resolution to these problems cost in the $1000-5000 range.
It has gotten to a point that the use of AI has turned life into a literal Kafkaesque nightmare. How soon will AI take the place of customer service for actual necessary services like calling your local DMV to make an appointment or even taking over 911 services? The promises made by AI companies about this software making our lives easier has merely become a drive to implement AI into every possible facet of life, not to benefit anyone, but to drive up profits.
This is rent seeking* by it's purest definition.
* [Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
[1] When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of “Content Jail” https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way...
[2] Meta suspended his business's social accounts — it took him a month to reach a human https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/funktasy-meta-ban-9.6932525
[3] OnlyFans Star Says She Slept With Meta Employees to Get Instagram Unbanned https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...
[4] Inside job: When an account gets hacked, social media giant Meta offers little support, spawning a shadowy network of brokers and Meta employees who profit from helping users get back online https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...
[5] Meta reportedly punished dozens of employees for offering an inside line to account recovery https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23464297/meta-allegedly-...
webdevver
the customer service was not "lost" to AI. it was never there to begin with, and never going to be there either. sadly, there is zero financial motivation for meta or google to help you recover your account.
and in cases when they did have humans... AI customer service is much better than the offshore lowest-cost non-english-speaking tech support that businesses would inevitably go for. atleast now the communication is comprehensible, even if i'm talking to a computer.
it is what it is.
add-sub-mul-div
On the Target web site tonight I was looking at a monitor stand and the Q&A section has some questions written and answered by Target's AI so as to seed the section with content.
One of the AI questions is, "What is the weight capacity of the monitor stand?" and the answer is, "The monitor stand is designed to support and elevate a computer monitor, ensuring stability."
What are we even doing here? Will anyone ever be accountable for all this stupidity that all of us see every day?
malfist
Amazon ripped out the Q&A for products to replace with AI. I don't know where they think they're going to get answers for new products from, because you can't ask or answer questions anymore. Only get vague, possible hallucinated summaries from historical Q&A or reviews.
I asked it what the difference between the standard and the pro version of a dehydrator was and it told me about the pixel counts and refresh rates. The pro dehydrator was apparently for gamers. The actual differences were the door hinge and the tray material (chromed steel vs stainless steel)
BobbyTables2
Well, the developer implementing it got to meet some goals and be eligible for a piece of bonus.
The manager can announce his team developed the requested feature…
The executive can proclaim how they’ve embraced AI and the digital transformation…
And now the paper towel companies can prosper from all the extra vomiting…
Fade_Dance
Target literally just let 1800 people go, so they probably have an internal initiative to fill the gap with... That.
smcin
Sure, but in my experience of online shopping, even garbage pretend-customer Q&A as opposed to no Q&A make it look like the product is getting more views, purchases reviews and comments. These days a product with no Q&A at all looks dubious.
nowittyusername
People will not get true benefits of these technologies until they own the hardware that the LLMS and its other various systems run on. Also until they are the ones to actually build the AI system or at the least had a community verify it thoroughly. Corporations are only interested in monetizing their products swaying the public and reducing litigation. You will not get a useful AI system from them, you will get corporate slop that is lobotomized and is neutered in every useful way. That's why I started working on my own fully uncensored no bullshit AI system that has the ability to use other AI systems. The regular folk will be in a HUGE disadvantage using the corporate owned AI systems compared to people who have fully capable systems that are not restricted in any of their intellectual thought traces or abilities. If you don't want to be the one left behind I strongly recommend you start thinking on how to either build such a system yourself or get something like that from an open source project.
hucklebuckle
Any open source projects you recommend?
My biggest frustration is that these widgets keep wiggling the UI. Lots of the JS side logic has this issue but, the latency on the AI widget that loads and then reflows my UI and move what I was just about to click on! Then a mis-click that is a rabbit hole