No, seriously, Google, mate, I'm not interested.
Even though I rarely use El Goog for search anymore because they’ve pretty much fucked it to the max, I do use it as a news reader. The mobile app defaults to a feed of stuff you’re interested in, and the feed is pretty good because, of course, they’ve been stalking us all across the internet forever.
So, this morning, over my breakfast coffee, I opened the app and…
OK. Fine. They want to pimp out their stupid AI app. But I’m not interested. I just want to read the news. So I tap the ‘Not Interested’ button and…
Nada.
I tap it again.
Nope.
I machine gun tap it a dozen times.
Nuhuh, JB, why don’t you try getting the app instead of being such a negative Nelly?
It’s like four hours later, and that fucking dialogue box is still there. I am now resolutely determined that I will NEVER install that stupid app.
And, of course, I’m no longer using Google even for news reading.
The insistence on inserting AI into everything really screams how much it's a solution in search of a problem.
I was helping to host a department meeting yesterday where we were showcasing the work each team had completed since the last catch up and we had a Lunar New Year theme. I was in charge of useless trivia and providing a quiz to keep people amused between presentations, so I googled my research. My colleague "helped" by getting our internal GPT to produce the quiz questions. Which was fine, but it was also something that took me 15 seconds in a search engine. I'm genuinely at a loss as to how that "adds value", which is ironic considering my team is using machine learning and AI to crunch data to enhance human decision making, and our endless mantra is "yeah that's cool, but is it going to add value to X?"
Sigh. Adding the mandatory "get off my lawn" to wrap up this rant.
It’s almost amusing that there’s an industry in writing guides to delete, disable and/or gimp the latest and greatest in software - to try and stop or minimise the data harvesting via software and capabilities we don’t want or need.
Bit like Copilot, Cortana, etc.
We need the core capabilities, just not the so-called bells and whistles / bloatware that the big companies try to ram down our throats with it. Opt in if you want, just don’t make it opt out or not optional.
It worked really well when Apple commissioned and forced U2’s Songs of Innocence via iTunes?
MS and Rover / Clippy have a lot to answer for.