Super frustrating the AI Chatbots are infecting my Firefox browser now. It looks like malware and pretty much acts like it since it cannot be disabled from the sidebar outside of closing this window. I like vertical tabs, but they require so many other options by default. Even more frustrating that the URL goes to a chrome browser link: chrome://browser/content/genai/chat.html
Alarms very heightened.
Could someone please enlighten me on what is the companies' endgame with putting AI chatbots everywhere in their products? (Especially generic ones like this) What are they looking to gain by doing so? And if money, how? Injected ads?
Honest question.
Search is dead. “Content” is dead.
AI is being seen as the portal through which we will access information in future. If so, control of that portal is worth trillions.
It’s a land grab.
This is imo the most succinct way to summarize it.
Are they a 100% sure it's the future? Maybe not. But they for sure won't risk missing out on it either, just in case it does end up being the future.
Search engines are getting increasingly harder to use & increasingly showing just AI slop, ads, or propaganda (ofc Google is at the cunting edge of this).
Not any of current big ones, but in the future I hope I'll be using a personal local open sauce AI just to have it interface with various megacorp AI (eg to do a search for me, or even more dystopian, to eg contact my bank's AI more efficiently).
And no, we have no idea how it will look like exactly, but they (megacorps) need to monetise AI, and with valuations that high (& atm still basically offering it for free or very cheap for individual consumers) I think that means they need to establish an environment where you won't be able to function without a few of the big AIs (they are engineering demand & a consolidated/monopolistic market & when they have it the sub prices will skyrocket).
Mozilla is just giving us (albeit shitty/perhaps unwanted) options.
We are not stopping enshitification & neither can Mozilla (and they as a foundation are trying).
I'm still wondering who is going to make the new and updated content for the AI to inaccurately return if it can't be found using a search. Like if AI summaries replaced all the news sites, where would the AI get the news?
It seems like they took the approach of loading a ton of historical data without any forethought on how AI replacing search would kill the motivation to post anything new on the web at all.
Tech companies: Sounds like someone else’s problem LOL
What if you weren't concerned about delivering what the user wanted as there wasn't sufficient competition to force you to, why you could just deliver whatever the highest bidder or your own interests and biases decided?
This used to be a debate Google had with itself, now it's every single company's dream to provide what they want you to see."Splinternet". What are your options to find other info if there isn't a functional, reasonably searchable internet to verify, compare, research, debunk, etc.?
It will take a shorter time to ruin the Internet than it did to build it, and I'll be racing back to the library as long as books are still in print.
Or realizing that sometimes you’re looking for something specific. I remembered an old website that described the seven major metropolises of Antarctica the other day and spent a month trying on and off to coax the result out of Google, which kept serving me results that only matched a few words from my search while Gemini tried alternately to educate me about how there were no real cities in Antarctica and to make up its own stories about imaginary cities there.
That problem is "down the stack" and not their concern
It's just surveillance capitalism as usual. The basis of free markets only works when all parties have agency and no information assymetries exist. AI chatbots with friendly, conversational tones elicit people to reveal way more personal data than they usually would, and make them more trusting of an algorithm that seems to know them perfectly.
This personal data is then refined and processed to not only profile and identify, but to directly modify the behaviour of users, so that they purchase or do things they wouldn't otherwise. Every notification, nudge, and inconvenient default setting is the result of billions of A/B tests proven to provide big tech maximum profit.
For some sobering statistics, over 60% of the US has Amazon Prime, the vast majority of which do not even bother to price compare. With Amazon preferencing its own Amazon Basics above competitors at higher prices, this is pure profit.
My take on it:
It's theorized that innovation is the leading force that makes capitalism go forward and get out of a cycle of crisis, and we've been in a crisis for quite some time already, so corporations are desperate for innovation. You might have observed how the word innovation has been used a lot in the last decade, from tech news to universities and investments, all desperate for innovation, pushing anything as innovative.
Then generative Ai appeared and is something that can look impressive at the surface. Corporations believe it to be THE INNOVATION. The one they have been seeking for a long time, that will change the world and create an economic boom just like post-war usa. So they invested as hard as they could and are pushing it as hard as they can.
People in positions to influence product direction must always be demonstrating that they're "innovating" like this to justify their existence and typically inflated salaries.
I remember when big data was the buzz. Everyone had to have big data, but nobody knew what to do with it. I would do presentations to rooms full of execs, and they would brag about how much data they had, but none could tell you how it added any value.
For the large part it's speculation, because very few of these companies would reveal such long term plans to the general public.
From my understanding it may be a set of several reasons for doing this, each reason feeding off one another:
They don't have one IMO.
There's the FOMO of "AI is the future. Why? I dunno, everyone is saying it." And of course all the AI companies jamming their chatbots into everything in the hopes they find something, anything that will make them profitable in the long term.
A lot of internet searching is switching to AI. It's the equivalent of pointing your browser bar directly to google.