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i remember when wikipedia and blogs and podcasts were forced into everyone's operating systems invasively and against their will and they had to employ increasingly tedious methods to disable it every few weeks

Dude, it's in fucking Notepad. A piece of software that's basically just there as a failback in case you desperately need to edit some text (.config, .ini, etc.) files, and can't get/use a more feature rich editor.

AI is like when Apple forced U2 onto everyone’s computer. I’m not saying it’s automatically bad; indeed, some people like U2, and they’re wrong, but more than anything else why did Apple think anyone wanted this? And I can’t even delete it from my music library?

im saying that none of the things you mentioned were forced into everything by tech companies the way AI is now. everyone used all that stuff because they wanted to. unlike AI

Downloads don’t mean a fucking thing, Paul. I’d think you’d understand that, what with having a website and being able to see who is using and staying on it versus those who used it once and then fucked off when you and your buddies started talking about how the AI was going to fix your love life.

For work, i had to install Access to authenticate on my phone. It automatically downloaded both copilot and chatgpt on my phone and i could not uninstall it. I had to remove the Access app and profile entirely. Do you consider microsoft edge the most installed browser ? is this fact valuable ?

before she went fully cultist about Sam Altman an ex-friend who works for OpenAI bragged to me that she would find bullshit tasks for ChatGPT to do so she could log that she used it X amount in her work without letting it anywhere near her work, because she'd get fired otherwise

And Microsoft took the button to remove CoPilot away, so it boots every time I open an Office app. And Google takes away your spellcheck (!!) when you limit Gemini. I had to get a separate browser extension to block the AI summary on Google. There's no way to turn it off in settings.

Sure, and I agree with that, but that's a different argument than whether or not tech companies forced things you didn't want down your throat in the past.