But… MUH BUZZWORDS!
(I really hate the Reddit-style overuse of that word.)
Comment on Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession
FaceDeer@kbin.social 10 months agoThis is not enshittification. Here's where the term came from:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification
In what way is adding an AI assistant to Notepad either "abusing their users" or "abusing their business customers?" It seems like it's just a useful new feature to me.
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Signtist@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Ah, the enshittification of enshittification.
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Perfection.
lemmyman@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That one and “FAFO” in its various incarnations can take a break for a bit, IMO
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Shockingly, I don’t know that one! I thought I read FIFO before rereading that.
poppy@lemm.ee 10 months ago
“Fuck around and find out” for everyone else who didn’t know.
prole@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I do too, considering it never needed a new term to begin with. This isn’t a new concept, and we already have a name for it: rent seeking
DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I like Cory Doctorow. I think his theory of enshittification is useful, but I find his definition flawed.
- Why is it limited to platforms? Can’t enshittification apply to other things like applications?
- Are business customers really required or can that step be skipped?
- The platforms dying thing isn’t what we are seeing. For example, Amazon is absolutely enshittified. They’re not dead. More like undead, continuing to shamble on consuming everything.
I still give credit to Cory for being an acute observer and coming up with a useful theory.
prole@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
There is no need to coin a new term, when “rent seeking” has done just fine for hundreds of years now.
This is not a new concept.
DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I completely forgot about that term. That may be more accurate. In fact, it describes what has Windows has become.
ThanksForAllTheFish@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
AI assistants usually need to upload the data to process it. So it’s potential enshitification via adding data upload/harvesting features to a trusted offline text editor. Usually companies have ways to generate revenue streams based on the data from these “free and useful features”. Adverts based on what text files you open might be the long term end goal.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 10 months ago
If you're concerned then don't use the feature. It's really simple.
ThanksForAllTheFish@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
That would be fine, but a lot of these features are added in an update, with complicated setups or mods to turn them off. Start bar local app search now gets sent to bing search by default, thats almost never what people want. Most people wont know how to disable it or care. But I guess thats fine as long as Microsoft gets to increase its bing usage stats and collect more user data.
Rentlar@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Adding an AI seems OK but per the article it will do it similar to Paint Co-creator. I can already see those types of “features” will get promoted more and more in updates and take more part of the screen.
Microsoft will want revenue trickling in from Notepad of all places…
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 9 months ago
Leaks of company secrets will increase.
unrelatedkeg@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
What about privacy and bloat? Do you really need an integrated big-brother Clippy again? There’s a reason they got rid of that annoying little bugger 20-ish years ago. Even killed Cortana. How many failed experiments more do we need?
If you need AI writing, you have it in Edge or on the ChatGPT site. Will they add AI to settings to help you turn on all the bloat and tracking for you?
Like just give me my damn control panel which has a working search feature (unlike, say, Settings)
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
Do you really need an integrated big-brother Clippy again?
You're making some pretty big assumptions about what this feature will be like.
kogasa@programming.dev 10 months ago
They’re sacrificing the utility of the tool to make it part of their new AI-driven operating system as a service platform. The only thing notepad had going for it was its completely simplicity, reliability, and speed. Nobody wants notepad to try to rope you into this ecosystem.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 10 months ago
You don't know that. You have no idea how this "cowriter" will be integrated. It could be just a little button off on the side, maybe with a setting in the configuration to hide it entirely, and you can ignore it completely.
yuriy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Any additional functionality added to an already feature-complete program is bloat, no two ways about it. If notepad+AI was a separate program, this would be a different discussion. Even if you can hide it completely, the fact that it’s there at all will affect performance. And even if it’s just a tiny blip in relative performance, it’s still the first step on the road to enshittification.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 10 months ago
I think you may be overestimating how much code is required for a program to simply use an AI, as in just calling an AI's API with a string of text and getting some text back in return. I've written code that does this and it's just a few lines.
The code for whatever UI Notepad wraps around it might be a few hundred more lines, that depends very much on the UI framework and what they want it to look like. But the AI part is trivial. The hard work of actually executing the AI's code is done on a remote server. Your home computer won't have to do any of that work.
kogasa@programming.dev 10 months ago
OK.
yuriy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
God, I should’ve seen you take this out and followed suit. Instead I engaged, and now unbeknownst to me I’m afraid of AI and putting words in people’s mouths, gotta love internet discourse