this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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ShowerThoughts
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My guy - your counterexamples are the fucking examples.
Android telling me 'hey guess what we're gonna scan your messages and constantly offer to pretend to be you' almost had me snap my phone in half. And I like this technology. I am a routine defender of the concept, on Lemmy. But the skeeze factor on these forced constant additions you seem to view as gentle are giving people the creeps. Justifiably so.
Right, and I'm saying my examples are extremely weaksauce when it comes to things being "shoved in someone's face."
I have an Android phone and I haven't had anything like what you're describing happen. It could be that there was some popup on update that said "hey there's this new feature" and I said "no" and I have now forgotten about it because it was a trivial, routine sort of thing that happens whenever there's an update - there's usually some kind of new feature it'll tell me about. If it didn't tell me about them I'd never know about them, so I'm fine with that.
Being inured to the shit these companies keep pulling is not disproof that they keep pulling shit. You're just shrugging about the awful scenario because they still let you opt out... sometimes. They didn't stop training on your private fucking messages, just because you never click the cluster-of-stars button. There's maybe a checkbox for that, buried deep in the settings, in a file cabinet labeled "beward the leopard." They might even honor it! But you can't really stop them, any more than you can revert to the versions of search engines that worked, five years ago.
What do you think people are talking about, if not the bullshit you blithely weather? Bing's not gonna put a gun to someone's head and tell them to render a video. But millions of people every day (okay well it's Bing) thousands of people every day are pestered about some bullshit capability. Getting cajoled is bad, actually. It's unpleasant. Especially when people wind up trying it, and it's... okay, at best. And then they get the same come-ons for the same bullshit, for every goddamn website people actually use. Gmail wants to know if you're interested in AI. Facebook wants to know if you're interested-- Twitter wants to know-- Google Search-- your own goddamn phone starts hassling you about this, and people go from tired of it to angry at it.
Justifiably so.
No, I'm shrugging about it because it really isn't that big a deal. What I've experienced in no way merits the term "shoved in my face," in my opinion. I consider that to be hyperbole.
See, this is the opposite of it being "shoved in my face". It's something I don't even see.
Whether it's good or bad is a separate issue, I'm just addressing the term "shoved in my face."
I think a lot of people have a fundamental hate on for AI in general, and so they're magnifying small inconveniences into enormous deals that they can more easily complain about. It's a common feature of the human psyche to pay more attention to things that bother you and overestimate their prevalence as a result.
I'm not saying people should like AI, they can think whatever they want about it. But when they start ranting about how AI is constantly pestering them and there doesn't appear to be evidence that that's actually the case I start to question the rational basis for their position.
A few days back Firefox added a shortcut to query the Perplexity AI to their list of various search engine shortcuts. The /r/firefox subreddit was full of apoplectic rage from people who clearly had not actually seen it and had no idea what it actually meant, because it was a complete nothingburger. It added an icon to a dropdown that few people ever open and that if it really bothers you can be removed with two clicks. That's the sort of reaction that bothers me, it's impossible to have a rational position on AI for or against with that sort of discourse going on.
If you want a real example of something being "shoved in your face", people still to this day make memes about WinRAR's "your trial period is ending, please pay for the full version" popup.
A lot of people's threshold differ from yours. You're just filtering out a wide swath of shit that people vocally detest.
People's hate-on for AI developed because this shit happened to them! The fact you don't see it as a big deal does not change other people's experience. You can internalize how the average person takes to being prodded, in this way - or you can live in denial of it. But nothing you say will change how they felt.
Companies know this, companies measure this, and they don't fucking care. They keep doing shit that "bothers" people, in the sense that a million strangers shared the same moment of revulsion because an object they rely upon cheerfully announced it was sprinkling some fresh hell into yet another interaction.
This denial feels deeply similar to Windows fanboys defending forced updates. They didn't mind clicking the button that makes their computer useless for an hour and then work differently forever, so what could you possibly want differently?
If that's really the threshold of rage for most people we'd have never survived the invention of the automobile.
The car, a famously uncontroversial invention. Never killed anyone, poisoned anything, or changed any climate.
What you're doing here is tantamount to telling early hit-and-run victims 'I woulda just dodged. How hard is it to move out the way?'
These are 800-pound gorillas dictating the fine details of how you experience modern life. They do A/B testing for whether Save goes before or after Cancel, to optimize some desired metric. And every god damn one of them has put this in front of people's eyeballs, as often as they'll tolerate, or worse. Do you think candy in the checkout aisle is there for your benefit?
I think you've completely missed the point. I was making an analogy to road rage. Drivers face many irritations while on the road and very few of them lose their minds over it.
Neat.
These are still 800-pound gorillas dictating the fine details of how you experience modern life. They do A/B testing for whether Save goes before or after Cancel, to optimize some desired metric. And every god damn one of them has put this in front of people’s eyeballs, as often as they’ll tolerate, or worse. Do you think candy in the checkout aisle is there for your benefit?
I am not bothered by candy in the checkout aisle. I just walk by it and don't buy it. It's not "in my face."
If they're doing such careful testing then don't you think they'd notice if their "shoving" was causing significant numbers of users to rage-quit?
Oh sure, because unless you quit Google forever, you can't possibly be pissed off about some new bullshit. If you'll tolerate abuse then it's not real.
We agree about the underlying tech - which is why it's baffling that you'd deny people had a bad reaction to this rollout. No amount of 'well they shouldn't!' will change that they did. Predictably, repeatedly, and in my opinion justifiably. If explaining why, at length and in detail, just sees glib variations on 'but but but they shouldn't,' why do you bother to speak? What do you hope to accomplish, through words? You won't change how millions felt. I think you're wrong to expect they should shut up and take it.
That /r/firefox thread I mentioned earlier was full of people claiming they were rage-quitting Firefox forever and storming off to various other browsers.
I'm not denying that some people have a bad reaction to the rollout, I'm saying I don't believe the explanation they're giving for why they're having a bad reaction. I think they're flipping out over the mere existence of AI, and are making excuses to justify that reaction.
And I also don't believe that "millions" feel this. This loops right back to the root of this whole comment thread; these social media bubbles we're in here give a skewed view of what the general population's feeling on this stuff is.
One million Americans is 0.3% of Americans. Millions is not the point to fixate on, when broadly discussing the people developing negative reactions to the bullshit foisted upon them. Insisting it was foisted gently is equally missing the point. This is an ongoing impact from every goddamn angle. Search is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). E-mail is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). Messages are worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). Social media is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). Fucking porn is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out).
Repeatedly insisting 'I don't think it's that big a deal' is not an argument. This frustration and annoyance is REAL. It's strong enough and widespread enough that some people assume it's universal! At what point do you at least consider it a user experience pitfall?
We're just going in circles now. They haven't "forced" AI on all those things. No more so than candy's being forced on me at the checkout aisle.
Speaking of "repeatedly insisting" things.
Again: what the fuck would forced mean, if not this?