Nobody using it is actually the ideal outcome. AI features are added, at no additional cost to the consumer, to extract money from investors. If customers began using the product, this feature would actually start having an ongoing cost.

Well this is why, as an enthusiastic AI user, even I usually want to disable intrusive AI!

If it's popping up in some random product I don't pay for I can only assume it's such a shitty model that it's probably not worth talking to.

(Exception: my bank has replaced its shitty phone tree with an AI chatbot. This is faster and the model has a "transfer to a human" tool. It's perfectly capable of following its playbook, determining that I need a human, and putting me in touch with one. So actually I started with "now I've gotta debase myself by talking to a fucking 32B Chinese LLM" but ended with "oh that was great actually").

> Companies forcing features that nobody wants

Literally every day that I browse HN I hear people complain about others' use of LLMs. How can you say "nobody wants" when it's used so much to elicit endless complaints?

we’ve reached the stage of market consolidation where corporations dictate consumer behavior, not vice versa

I really do wonder if the market is being irrational or if we just cannot see what they are

I suspect that many people dislike AI but are begrudgingly using it. I would put money very few people are completely avoiding it. It's very hard to avoid now anyways.

Maybe the AI company strategy is really just "make it so invasive in life it's so difficult to avoid and expensive enough to revert that companies and governments will never go back anyways"

Many people do like AI tools and use them regularly. ChatGPT has nearly a billion weekly active users.

It's just that another group of people absolutely hates the idea of AI and wants it to go away.

Alternative hypothesis: people do gradually use these features, but HN became a weird anti-AI bubble for some reason.

I mean, many of the features had previous pre-AI attempts. They all sucked much more. This is the first time they have a remote chance of working (but in many cases, timidity or cheapening out is still making them barely usable - which is why 99% of the cases it's still much, much better to throw one of the three SOTA LLMs at the app to operate it (or on its data) from the outside).

No one wants? I understand normies on Facebook saying that, but you are on HN. How do you keep that position with the evidence getting thrown at you daily?

Nobody wants = nobody on bluesky. I don't get this crusade mentality.

The bigger problem with these apps is that they are proprietary and they have been spying on us.

This whole "nobody wants" narrative is getting tiresome. It is provably false, and is just a rhetorical tool.