alt Hacker News> What AI boosters don't realize is that we're not in the optimistic days of the 1990s anymore.
Comments like this are in a different reality than most consumers. Most consumers don’t care about things like avoiding lock in to a platform. If the platform solves their problem then they don’t have any reason to leave it anyway. They’re not worried if their data is used to show them more targeted ads.
Topics like this show a sharp divergence between what you read on Hacker News and how actual users operate. We already knew that people who don’t trust Facebook aren’t going to suddenly start using Muse. They were never going to consider it. For the people who do actually use Meta products, which is a customer base counted in the billions, many will not have any problem using these tools.
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I asked my wife to not share any info with Muse and she said “Well they know everything already”. Well I was able to convince her not to with some stories about hallucinations of agents getting things horribly wrong as agents in the past, because the privacy concerns just didn’t phase her. Shes even more aware than most people since I’m very privacy aware. 100% it’s very echo chambery to claim that it’s not 1990 anymore. It’s like a historian saying that history won’t repeat itself because we all know what happened last time
If we’re talking about the average consumer, they’re increasingly hostile towards ML in general and Facebook in particular. The majority want the tech regulated stat, so you might want to think twice before appealing to the masses.
I see a lot of validity in your reply, but I think there is still nuance in how these priorities are expressed. How would you compare this issue to the Flock backlash, for example?
This is only true as long as they don’t think about the future or do risk management.
How do you explain the brand segmentation Facebook is doing with Muse? They're keeping the Meta / Facebook brand very far away from the Muse product.
Doesn't that imply Meta itself believes users care?
Most consumers absolutely care, why do you think the biggest bipartisan issue is a massive national backlash against tech companies and a clear majority of workers being against LLM tools in the workplace?
These types of comments just show what a massive bubble you're in.
Most consumers do not want or need agents which also shows how much of a bubble tech people are living in.
Well they will start caring when their teen with image issues starts getting targetted beauty ads[1], or when they get pregnant, want to abort, and get directed to an anti-abortion center instead[2], and afterwards they get served "abortion reversal pills" ads[3].
Or when they are hit by any other privacy fuckup like that.
[1] https://futurism.com/facebook-beauty-targeted-ads [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61320202 [3] https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/facebook-made-money-...
Imagine we were talking about soda (or pop, or coke, or soft drink, depending on your dialect). Personally, I find it absolute insanity to be regularly consuming so much dissolved sugar especially during our ongoing obesity and digestive health epidemic.
But, “most consumers” don’t care about that. The beverage industry is insanely profitable, especially with recent forays into “energy drinks”.
Do people who drink so much dissolved sugar live without consequences? Absolutely not. They have a significantly lower quality of life and die much sooner than people who do not drink dissolved sugar.
I don’t see your comment as a valid dismissal. Just one more way that individual outcomes in our society are increasingly K-shaped.