alt Hacker NewsThe worst is Gmail's recent feature to suggest an entire goddamn email that includes cheery little details, doing its best to mimic human pleasantries and small talk. Rather than simply offering "yep/nope" type short replies like it once did, it'll now auto-compose and suggest a multi-paragraph email responding to questions like "How's the family doing?" or "Is your older cat tolerating the new kitten yet?" with completely fabricated saccharine slop.
It's like Clippy pops up and goes "It looks like you're trying to maintain a shred of human connection in an online interaction. Would you like a smiling skinwalker to do that for you instead?"
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> CLIPPY: It looks like you're trying to maintain a shred of human connection. Would you like a smiling skinwalker to do that instead??
This is hilarious as someone who hasn't used the gmail composition interface in years. I left it to use my own domain, but it seems like I get to enjoy this mess with popcorn too instead of tears.
I get so angry about these intrusions. There is nowhere I am more opposed to AI written slop than in my interactions with friends and family.
The iOS keyboard and gmail app are the worst offenders here.
You get a feeling some people would send a robot wearing their face to hug their mom if they thought the mom couldn't tell the difference. And to have sex with their wife. It'll happen too which is the sad bit.
It's literally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_(2006_film) isn't it?
The world has a lot of tech journalists, but I have yet to see the longform article, with actual interviews, trying to dig into what is happening in this kind of manic push for features that seem to have no traction with anyone
There are failures in the history of software that come down to believers not realizing that they could never deliver on the promise they were selling, but at least the promise was compelling. But nowadays we are seeing this large orgs try to ship things that could never work. The 1000s of copilots. The hallucinated cat story... The kinds of thing you'd never demo to a serious product-centric exec, because it'd be your last day at the company.
And then there's the current execs, but I guess you'll never find one that will be honest with a journalist here. Can they not see that their product orgs are bankrupt? Whatever Nadella wanted, it sure wasn't the current copilot situation. It's not one product going wrong, but large parts of organizations going in directions that don't pass the smell test. We are in one of the least stable moments in tech since Windows 95 changed winners and losers. The times where malinvestment ruins established companies. How are we seeing basically every large company flailing?