I keep seeing this everywhere, and I had to go to Great lengths to remove co-pilot from my windows 11 on my current PC once I upgraded. Had to use a bloatware removal script to forcibly get that thing the hell off there. Now I’m seeing ads on Amazon and other places about PCs being bundled with copilot AI. I have tried using co-pilot myself, it is completely worthless. That thing is a hot piece of garbage, and somehow, works even worse than chat GPT. Like, that is truly impressive, because Chat GPT has degraded in quality over time and now they are in the news often for various controversies, the latest being a complaint about how they can’t survive without stealing copyrighted content…
Who in their right mind is hoping to get a copilot powered PC???
My thought… When GPT was new, I was quite invested and it worked pretty well. That was what, almost two years ago? I’ve found it just being easier and more reliable learning stuff myself and writing my own paragraphs. I wonder if normies are still in that honeymoon phase.
At some point, the false answers and predictable, soulless responses catch up to you. In a world that’s over reliant on boilerplate AI text, a personalized email with as little sass goes a long way.
Every PC will be using AI as we move forward and thinking they won’t seems as head in the sand to me as thinking the Internet would be a fad. Remember how awful the Internet was in the 80s and 90s? AI is in a similar spot today.
Why would I read a manual when I can ask an AI to summarize it and give me pages so I can confirm? If I’m trying to do a task I know a million people have solved like Python code to translate XLSX and CSV to JSON and back, why wouldn’t I use AI for that?
Trusting AI outright and not reviewing the answers is silly, but doing research with AI is soooo much faster. Also the majority of articles and manuals you find online written in the past year used AI and you can have CoPilot spit it out to you WITH the original sources that the website/blog hides.
The idea that AI isn’t trustworthy is silly, because no one is trustworthy. You should always have been double checking things for yourself, but sitting and struggling through something for 2 days is foolish when AI could do 80% of the work for you in seconds.
They downvote them for speaking the truth.
Most people don’t care, they won’t even notice sadly. They will walk into Best Buy, get swarmed by 3 sales people, tell them, “I’m looking for a new laptop.”
And the sales people will take them straight over to the laptop section which is all filled with the latest Microsoft swill and sell them one of them.
There will be no discussion of privacy, no discussion of Microsoft’s recent scandals, no discussion of alternatives. They will parrot whatever Microsoft’s talking points are, “it’s safe, encrypted, secure, fast, etc…”
If we want consumers to care, we have to reach them before they buy their new upgrade. This often starts with your family and close friends. You need to inform them, you need to tell them there is a better way.
This is how I got my parents switched from Windows 10 to Linux. They were asking me to help with their computer problems, (10 year old computer that was pretty low-power when it was new.)
I told them that Windows 10 was EoL next year and their hardware was way to old to upgrade. I said that I could put on Linux which would be much faster, more secure and private, wouldn’t require a new computer, and would do everything they needed. My mom was nervous, but I went over everything her and my dad used it for, (browsing, email, Word and printing, PDF reading, Turbo Tax, and Spotify.)
Only slight pain point was getting my mom onto Turbo Tax cloud. But she is slightly tech savvy, so it wasn’t too bad.
They’ve been on it for about 9 months now and it works great. Their computer is much snappier, and I don’t have to worry about them getting viruses, (my dad is 0% tech savvy and will click on almost any link he sees.)
Does Amazon really think anyone out there wants a PC with AI bloatware on it?
Setting aside this particular situation and software package and speaking more-generally as to preinstalled bloatware…
People have been buying PCs for a long time with bloatware on it offsetting the price of the PC, so I’m pretty sure that people either are fine with bloatware or unaware of it sufficiently not to take it into account when buying a PC.
I’m sure there’s people out there but I don’t know any. I do have a few coworkers that gush about Alexa and are very happy to have Amazon integrated throughout their life and home (which blows my mind). I assume those kind of people are their intended target.
It seems unlikely to me that Amazon doesn’t have very good data on whether their marketing works in their favour or not.
Does anyone really think that Amazon cares what anyone wants?
The Lemmy user base is so out of touch with the average consumer.
I love how 70% of subsequent comments are tech savvy Lemmings describing what average users are really like, based on how in touch with them they are.
To be fair, the average consumer is a lazy, complacent, unaware fucking dumbass.
I’m sure that kind of discourse will persuade them not to use AI.
It’s not meant to. It’s just an assessment.
Well as long as we know the ship is sinking around us, we don’t need to know why or do anything about it.
That’s not untrue though. The number of times the average consumer has over corrected to only put themselves into a position where they over correct yet again is sobering.
I’m not dissing AI or the average consumer, I’m just saying they often paint their asses into a corner over and over again only to complain when they paint themselves into a corner.
Number of times I’ve heard people complain about having to pay the monthly price for iCloud is a non-zero number. But then you suggest getting a phone with an SD slot and they’re aghast that you’d suggest them giving up their blue bubbles. They hate ads on their Smart TV but how would they watch their Disney+ without a Smart TV? I’ve got a CVS receipt sized list of things consumers complain about that consumers wanted but now find themselves in the awkward position of “not like this.”
C’est la vie. But there’s not going to be any kind of discourse that’s going to prevent folks shooting themselves in the foot. All we can do is just present some other options for when they inevitably have a bloody stump where their foot used to be. They’re going to use AI no matter what and eventually they’ll be wondering how their back is against the wall with all this paint surrounding them. Yet again.
I don’t think there’s any point any trying to persuade them of anything really. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. So yeah, the average consumer is completely going to snag these shit PCs up in droves, they also are going to eventually regret that, but that’s a future them problem apparently.
You and the person you replied to are correct.
It’s self-selecting. In order to be here in the first place, you have to give a shit enough to ignore the big corporate social media sites in favor of finding and using this one.
Do you mean out of touch as in unaware or diverging opinions?
I mean yes but in the case no.
Most customers are not demanding it.
Yeah, same as Reddit really. I don’t know how many times I saw Reddit comments or posts with “everyone knows”. The reality is that if you took enough time and interest to join an online forum about something, you’ve gone deeper than most people.
The Lemmy user base is so out of touch with the average consumer.
This is probably true. I don’t know many people who aren’t super heavy into tech, I’ve had a gaming PC half my life, but I do have a couple friends who don’t even have a laptop, PC, computer, or anything. They just have a phone. I don’t know how they get by.
^^This, So Much This^^
Your average person wants a magic box that will give them what they’re looking for. They don’t care who know’s what about them, as long as it’s not creepy in their face. When they say Honey, what do you think about tacos tonight and all of a sudden, all ads are for Taco Bell; that’s too far.
They don’t know that Google has made search shittier so they can sell more ads or move people into training AI’s for their purchasing tastes. More importantly, they don’t care. If you put up a check box that says remember all the shit you search for and try to make better guesses about what you’re looking for and have give you better ads, most people would check it.
Grandma wants to know that old Christmas raisin cookie recipe and what to do when you hands start hurting. Dad wants to know how to watch Youtube on Roku without Ads and mom want to know how many seasons of Scandal there are. If Google search has gone to shit and AI delivers all that to them, they’ll all take it.
Me, I came to Lemmy to get away from the algorithms. I use newpipe mainly to get rid of the doomscroll. I don’t want suggestions. I don’t want to swipe on TikTok training it to spoonfeed me 30 second clips. The average consumer? They don’t care about any of that. Whatever it takes to CONSUME.
Yes. Lemmy users are so far from normal technology users it hurts. If it gets to general acceptable level of usefulness everyone will use it.
Nobody wants it and if amazon/google/microsoft/facebook would be honest about what it really does, the overwhelming majority would decline it in a heartbeat. But corporations do what corporations do best and consumers take it with a shrug. And I kind of get it. Life is too short to learn about everything and make the most informed choice on everything. Often you just shrug it off and never really use it.
It’s called an advertisement. Why are you seeing them? Are you just over here rawdogging the internet without uBlock Origin?
Nobody hopes for it, but the average user just wants A PC™, and they don’t know that they have a choice in the matter.
It’s up to the rest of us to help the average user in our lives make informed choices.
Why even “up” grade in the firstplace? I’m keeping some of my windows systems at 10 due to bullshit hardware restrictions and others because I see no meaningful appeal to this cancerous platform.
You have 13 months left on Windows 10 before it becomes potentially unsafe to use:
I’m in the US so that kind of future planning is beyond current capabilities. Could very well see myself driving shirtless on a stolen motorcycle and swinging a chain 13months from now. Pretty sure Linux will be the OS of the apocalypse anyway.
Windows 10 LTSC is still supported for security issues until 2032, so there’s still a non-Windows 11 option, if you really want one.
Why wouldn’t anyone want this (other than see below) ? Ltsc seems like a better version of windows and yeah, long term security support. I don’t think there’s a legitimate way for home users to get access to this for a reasonable price though. Piratey options make me nervous with OS stuff so I’ve avoided this. I really don’t want the headache of a random unexpected OS lock down with an “invalid license” warning after some routine Tuesday security update.
Good morning sir/ma’am I’m here to tell you about our Lord and Savior Linus Torvalds. He sacrificed his wallet to bring you a free and open operating systems. We don’t judge what flavor of Linux you use. As long as you agree that Linus saved us from Bill Gates who stole ancient secrets from the ruins of Xerox Parc and has since embraced the evil that is bloat ware.
Through Linux you can be saved!
Forced to use it at work. Can confirm. Co-Pilot is a turd
In what ways are you forced to use it? Or are you simply using a computer that has copilot on it. It doesn’t seem too hard to just…not use it? Just like Cortana in 10
I have heard that a lot of corps in less privacy/data sensitive fields have been strongly encouraging employees to use it to “boost throughput”, and it’s because the C-suites had An Idea that it’d be great to sign a multi-million dollar contract with MS or whatever cloud LLM provider, except nobody uses it because in many cases it’s just worse than useless, and not that many people give enough of a shit to essentially learn how to be a “prompt engineer” on top of their normal jobs.
It’s amusingly similar to how all the RTO initiatives are actually motivated by the C-suites being super pissed that their expensive corporate real estate is a giant waste of money in many cases, despite the fact that people are often working better and more efficiently from home.
Can confirm. Wife got a fancy AI tool from corporate and it’s only delayed her work (which is mostly in excel). Lots of false equations and bad advice. So she comes to me and I give her a simple, no frills formula and solve the problem in 5 to 15 minutes.
Oh and of course they’re removing their RTO initiatives soon and adding another day of mandatory in office. Mind you, free lunch isn’t the pull they think it is for my wife, although if I’m being honest, if it’s me … Well, I do have a thing for free catering. Not 1 hr+ commute, but I’ll bike for an hour for free food (and coffee).
It’s just a sidebar (for now) and it’s up-to-date on internet information, unlike ChatGPT. It’s free GPT 4 on a search engine.
