NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS AI

Unless you've been living under a rock, it seems like just about every application you download or use no matter what operating system or device you're using is wedging AI into them. Why can't it just stop?

I know AI is the craze right now. Companies want to differentiate themselves from the competition. One email application says "Hey! We'll check your email to make sure it comes off as professional, or cheeky, or whatever mood you want to convey!" Its competitor advertises. "We'll write the email and response for you! No typing required!" A third just goes ahead and responds to the email without you even knowing and next thing you know you have an inbox full of correspondence that you never read, wrote, or even realized was going on.

I joke, but sometimes this is what it feels like. I've been bouncing around browsers. Firefox, Zen, Vivaldi, and LibreWolf mostly. Three of the four don't have any AI built into them at all and they're glorious. Firefox has added AI features but does provide a "kill switch" to turn off all the AI features that already exist and to disable any features they might add in the future. That's better than others, but it still kind of gives me the "ick".

I'm just annoyed that it's so hard nowadays to go ahead and try to do what you want to do without AI. Firefox was introducing the "shake to summarize" functionality where if you shook your phone, it would give you an AI summary of the page you were on. I'll admit I've never actually tried this, but given how wrong AI can be, who knows how correct the summary is. If nothing else, it will probably lose the context of the article or text. But with AI and Google Zero, that's going to become the norm rather than the exception.

I know there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, but it'd be nice for companies to really think about how and more importantly, why they're throwing AI into their software. I see so many cases where it feels like slop rather than something that could be helpful.