Seeing forced AI in any product makes me stop using it immediately.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Absolutely! Alltrails just added AI which means I need a new trail app.
It’s like a restaurant selling granite rocks for dessert. Nobody will buy them or eat them—so the product fails miserably. But if a popular restaurant adds a dollar to the meal price, and gives every customer a rock with their bill—well, then they can say that:
Every customer gets rocks for dessert.
Every customer pays for it.
Their business is more profitable because of the tasty granite rocks.
I just wanted to spotlight this excellent metaphor tbh.
I disagree with the last part of this post, though (the idea that lawyers, doctors, firefighters etc. are inevitably going to be replaced with AI as well, whether we want it or not). I think this is precisely what AI grifters would want us to believe, because if they could somehow force everyone in every part of society to pay for their slop, this would keep stock prices up. So far, however, AI has mainly been shoved into our lives by a few oligopolistic tech companies (and some VC-funded startups), and I think the main purpose here is to create the illusion (!) of inevitability because that is what investors want.
It's annoying cause it ain't even AI. It's a glorified thesaurus really.
The concept is cool, definitely has some uses. Not AI and cannot do what they want it to.
Here's the WSJ article on Archive: https://archive.ph/kS9Dx
Useful as a mainstream source for people in general hating AI.
it's tyranny when your schema.org/WebSite doesn't declare itself a schema.org/WebSite (nor any of the other semantic web stuff we were promised) and it doesn't work without javascript. "a.i." has become a distraction generator from the death by a thousand cuts that started with jeff bezos' API Mandate.