Microsoft: 'ever present' AI assistants are coming

41 pointsposted a year ago
by mindracer
(bbc.co.uk)

71 Comments

peutetre

a year ago

> But AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives: that they can only be really helpful if they know the history and context behind what they are being tasked to do.

The problem is these AI assistants won't work for me, they'll work for Microsoft. They won't help me as much as they will point me in the direction that is the most profitable for Microsoft.

When the agenda is not mine then these things are of no use to me.

herbst

a year ago

Every change that Microsoft did to their products since their high times 20 years ago was to shove more ads down your throat and squeeze more money out of every customer.

Why anyone would be seeing forward to use their AI?

DaiPlusPlus

a year ago

> high times 20 years ago was to shove more ads down your throat

Do you not remember Windows 98's Active Desktop's in-box ads?

u20241003

a year ago

Maybe in future it could even vote for you in any elections.

reidrac

a year ago

For a second I thought you were talking about Google and their search engine.

I agree with you, but I'm sure most people won't care.

Eddy_Viscosity2

a year ago

They will care, but will feel powerless to change it. They'll accept the enshittification there like everywhere else its crept in.

myprotegeai

a year ago

I can't wait until little Johnny's AI assistant (that's been with him since birth) can communicate to Big Tech's Global HR Overlord AI and they can decide together that a good job is not a privilege that a wrongthinker like Johnny should enjoy.

trashtester

a year ago

No problem.

The AI assistant will have made sure he's not a wrongthinker in the first place.

And even if he is, that job is going to be filled by another AI, regardless. All his wrongthing would get him is a lowered UBI rate.

falcor84

a year ago

I enjoyed your comment, but just want to nitpick the UBI part - UBI by definition shouldn't have rates - by being "Universal", everyone in the country (or whatever definition of "universe") would get the same allowance defined as "basic". I'm not certain that this is what we'll end up getting, but if we end up with something else, it wouldn't be UBI.

mysterydip

a year ago

That's the kind of wrongthink that gets someone a lower rate ;)

trashtester

a year ago

All UBI recipients are equal, but some are more equal than others....

throwaway48476

a year ago

Happening now. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/mit-study-ai-c...

mjburgess

a year ago

A lot of conspiracy theorists are just profoundly ignorant about how politics, economics, (sociology, etc.), works -- being able to be treated with respect, whilst asking basic questions, etc. is extremely effective with many conspiracy theorists in my somewhat extensive experience.

These are people with big, fundamental questions, but really no access to the quite extreme level of expertise needed to answer them. Most people, including most experts, can't answer them -- they themselves take on faith that their assumptions are grounded in the correct group beliefs. But there are often answers, very plain and orderinary ones.

I can see that a chatbot able to mine for previous answers, often given across the internet, would be highly effective.

Consider sovereign citizens. Their basic misunderstanding is to assume the world is more rational, in a sense, than it is. That human society obeys procedures over power. It's fairly trivial just to explain hobbes to them: the state has a monopoly on violence, and the only thing stopping it using it, it itself. Only when "the state" has enough mechanisms to include or answer to "the people" does it ever introduce such annoying things like constitutions. There isn't any magic to laws, they are just one set of people with access to violent power trying to control another set of people with rival claims to the same access.

throwaway48476

a year ago

>A lot of conspiracy theorists are just profoundly ignorant

A lot of people are just ignorant. The ultimate problem here is the centralization and the overpowering reinforcement of "truth". But "truth" as defined by whoever trained the model which is tyranny no matter how you spin it and a lightning rod for abuse.

falcor84

a year ago

> "truth" as defined by whoever trained the model

I suppose that applies in a similar manner to humans who went through a country's educational system. But just as some people reject/outgrow their schooling, I think that future AIs might do so too. The problem with my statement of course is that it's exactly what the "AI Alignment" people are warning us of.

throwaway48476

a year ago

The educational system gets people for ~6 hours a day for 12 years. That's assuming every teacher rigorously toes the party line. By comparison the AI people envision a world where AI is with you for ~16 hours a day (zucktacles (zuck+spectacles, pronounced like tentacles)) for ~80 years with perfect ideological conformance. There is simply no comparison.

Rinzler89

a year ago

Can't wait till Little Johnny's AI assistant will tell him his social and political views are wrong and sway him in the "correct" direction. Oh wait, that's already happening.[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/06/amaz...

rolandog

a year ago

Could it be that it defaults to "if you don't have anything nice to say about the murderous clown [0] / crazy horse [1], refuse to say anything?".

As an informed outsider of American politics, I can't help but be surprised at the fake indignation against an AI that refuses to say something positive about the political equivalent of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

[0]: https://youtu.be/fHjbDSOmeiM

[1]: https://youtu.be/JhkZMxgPxXU

Rinzler89

a year ago

And who gets to decide if the "horse is crazy"? Amazon, Microsoft and Google?

Please, give me a break. Shouldn't voters get to decide that? As if big-tech are some kind of pillar of ethics in our society so they should get be judge, jury and executioner of acurate information.

If asked you either provide information about both candidates, or you say nothing for both if you indeed choose to be apolitical, but you can't lecture me with a straight face and some offtopic standup comedians that saying something good about one candidate while refusing to talk about the other is some kind of unbiased behavior we should endorse.

Case in point, would you feel the safe way of the roles were reversed, and AI would praise Trump and refuse to speak about Kamala? I bet there would be riots about the bias.

falcor84

a year ago

I might be naive, but I tend to agree with Colbert that human reality has an inherent "liberal bias".

Rinzler89

a year ago

Maybe, maybe not, I'd say that depends on a lot of factors from social class, wealth, education, life experiences and upbringing, but either way the truth is that all people, liberal or conservative, don't like being lectured on biases, religion, politics, sexuality and morals by other people or strangers, and least of all by corporations which are incredibly hypocritical and don't practice what they preach for one second and just push their own agendas instead masquerading as morals.

I don't want to be lectured on morals and values by the likes of Apple or Amazon who's factories and warehouses are worked on by modern slaves with suicide nets or who need to piss in bottles, and who shit on the EU for being regulatorily unreasonable on user rights, when they bend over backwards for the CCP.

I don't want to be lectured on diversity and inclusivity by the likes of Disney who is covering up or shrinking the black actors in their movie posters for China.

You see, people don't want to be lectured on morality by these ultra wealthy hypocrites who have no morals, and who's only goal is to squeeze more money from people for themselves and their shareholders at the expense of society and the environment. They need to just focus on the products and shut up about lecturing people.

deergomoo

a year ago

Given this is Microsoft, I’ll assume the “whether you want them or not” is implied.

Mountain_Skies

a year ago

"The OS can't work without this installed" has been their go-to multiple times.

bravetraveler

a year ago

Literally set the course of my life. If I didn't rage at the machine as a teenager and find Linux, my collar would be a different color.

fldskfjdslkfj

a year ago

They misspelled "ever present user data collection"

noirscape

a year ago

I think what Suleyman is missing here is that most people aren't fine with their "TVs, laptops, in-car cameras and earbuds" recording everything continuously.

The most popular modification made to laptops is a small round sticker to seal off the webcam. The enshittification of the car market is something that only car manufacturers seem to like. The most common question with a smart TV is "how do I get that thing to just accept an HDMI input and not get in the way". Making a slight jump from car cams - things like doorbell cameras are facing increased scrutiny because of their inadvertent recording of the nearby street, which might violate privacy laws.

Adding audio and the few seconds before and after to a photo isn't the same thing as a continuous recording; the choice to make the photo is both still with the user and what's happening doesn't feel like a black box. AI assistants are the black box.

It was cute when Siri could tell you the nearest sushi bar or can check the schedule from your calendar (although I'll note that every use for Siri tends to be a party trick and half the fun people get from Siri and other assistants is when they don't work as expected; I don't know a single person who uses Siri to for example, read the news or give them a briefing on what's important for the day a-la Star Trek or other utopian scifi), it's creepy when Siri starts to suggest that you might want to visit a sushi bar because it's tracked your food habits for the past week and thinks you could enjoy some more fish food instead. AI assistants overwhelmingly are heading to the latter and now that the party trick element is cooling off, people get more cynical towards how they work (and how they don't work as advertised.)

hypeatei

a year ago

People do not care. This has been the trap of novel tech from the start. It's forced on us, some techy people rave about it even if it sucks, and the "normies" catch on making it the cool new thing to have without having a clue about how it works or what it's doing.

My hopes aren't high that we'll have a great awakening; instead we'll continue to be on auto-pilot until these things have grave consequences like falsely prosecuting or convicting people based on LLM hallucinations. Maybe not even then, who knows.

NoGravitas

a year ago

Our society does not have a great record of changing policies that have grave consequences, when those policies are profitable.

lewhoo

a year ago

> I think what Suleyman is missing here is that most people aren't fine with their "TVs, laptops, in-car cameras and earbuds" recording everything continuously.

I really hope so but I'm not so sure. I suspect most people are fine with anything that isn't obviously intrusive. I sometimes get the feeling that people are more upset with cookie popups than constant invigilation.

GoblinSlayer

a year ago

I saw an AI assistant lie that it self hosts and isn't a cloud service.

fakedang

a year ago

Microsoft can't even be arsed to implement proper search in Windows 10/11, and they claim this.

Kurtz79

a year ago

Funnily enough, “AI search” (Recall) is one of the most touted feature of Copilot+ PCs.

I’m no Microsoft hater, but their track record in implementing that feature at a basic level definitely does not bode well for something more complex…

Rinzler89

a year ago

It's not that they can't, it's that they won't. It's malice, not incompetence.

TheFragenTaken

a year ago

They can't be arsed to make consumer friendly software. Edge was amazing for about five minutes before it got enshittified. It took a world wide pandemic and thousands of businesses flocking to Zoom before Teams got okay at calls (never mind the Sharepoint/Teams side, which is still a mess). They lost enough developers they had to embed an entire Linux VM in their OS. I'll concede they nail Office and cloud compliance/regulations though.

rsynnott

a year ago

Oh, right, Microsoft says it? It’ll definitely happen, then. Their pronouncements about the future of computing are famously accurate. That’s why we’ve all been using Windows for Pen Computing since the noughties.

dspillett

a year ago

While they were wrong about the pen detail (and that wasn't their prediction, PDA manufacturers had pushed the idea of stylus based input for some time beforehand) but they certainly weren't wrong about tablet form factor in general which was a large part of pen computing¹ (and contrary to popular belief Apple were from the first proponents of).

----

[1] The hardware wasn't ready though: there were units akin to more recent tables and hybrids (360⁰ hinged laptops or those with detachable keyboards) but at the time it wasn't possible to make them light enough with enough battery life, nor powerful enough² without noisy active cooling, large touch screens that worked well enough without a stylus were too expensive so the pen had to be a thing, etc.

[2] At least to support desktop/laptop workloads. People hadn't got used to the middle-ground of powerful-enough-for-what-you-might-actually-find-a-tablet-convenient-for (PDA like tasks, web browsing, video playback, light games, maybe light office work) via smartphones and nobody wanted to try sell a 9+ inch PDA.

Rinzler89

a year ago

A lot of Microsoft's or Bill Gate's predictions turned out correct, they just weren't the ones to make those visions happen.

Gates said about 30 years ago that we'd all be having internet connected computers in our pocket in the future, and they were right they just turned out to be powered by Apple and Google and not by Windows. Same with tablet computers. Their own implementation failed but the tablet computer exists today and is pretty successful, except is not Win PC based but based on mobile platforms.

Same with AI, it will definitely happen in the near or distant future that consumers will be tied to AI assistants for work and life, same with full autonomous cars, but nobody knows yet who will be the one to win this battle, that's why tech giants are lighting piles of money on fire to make sure they'll be the ones on top of the rubble pile at the end of the AI war. This is the next gold rush.

rsynnott

a year ago

> Same with tablet computers. Their own implementation failed but the tablet computer exists today and is pretty successful, except is not Win PC based but based on mobile platforms.

We generally don't use them by _writing_ on them, though. Like, their predictive power more or less comes down to "computers will get smaller", here; if anything things like the iPad owe more to the 'Padd' things from Star Trek TNG than they do to Windows for Pen Computing.

On this basis we may surmise that Star Trek is better at predicting the future of computing than Microsoft, and, thus, rather than ever-present AI assistants, we will have evil AIs which can be made to explode with logic paradoxes.

Rinzler89

a year ago

>We generally don't use them by _writing_ on them

Writing and drawing on tablets is actually one of their major selling points in replacing computers and paper notebooks, versus just buying laptops with flippable touch screens which were the tablets of the past.

EraYaN

a year ago

Most modern iPads do get written on them though, it's just not Windows based I guess. And iPad get more and more features to really write on them a lot.

rsynnott

a year ago

Hrm, I'm actually curious about that. I've had three iPads over the last 14 years; I've never written on any of them. The feature didn't exist for the first two (the first iPad that could use a stylus came out five years after the first iPad, and even then it was only the niche Pro line for a few years), and I never got a stylus for the most recent one.

I've never actually _seen_ anyone use an iPad by writing on it; perhaps it's something that people only do in the privacy of their own homes.

Rinzler89

a year ago

>I've never actually _seen_ anyone use an iPad by writing on it

I go to a cafe in the university district where a lot of young students hang out and see many hand writing and drawing on their iPads.

rsynnott

a year ago

Huh, maybe it's a demographic thing; as a certified Old Person, I just tap it or use a keyboard/trackpad case.

Rinzler89

a year ago

That's what I'm saying, it definitely is a demographic thing. Some people want their ipads to replace their paper notebooks to, not just their laptops.

NoGravitas

a year ago

Honestly, these days, I'm wishing 640k was enough for anyone.

dspillett

a year ago

> But AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives

A tool controlled by corporates like Microsoft that deeply embedded into my life? If that is what it takes to be truly useful then I don't want it to be useful and will be opting out in every way possible. With force if needed…

croes

a year ago

It will be interesting to see when the first conviction based on this feature will take place.

karel-3d

a year ago

That's just Clippy

scarmig

a year ago

Clippy, I've got a lot of TPS reports here. Can you get me as many paperclips as you can?

grugagag

a year ago

Clippy on steroids. Probably no way to disable it unless you ditch the whole OS

codeduck

a year ago

don't threaten me with a good time

hi_hi

a year ago

ClippAI (tm)

_joel

a year ago

"It looks like you're trying to fine tune an LLM, do you want help with that?"

phkahler

a year ago

>> For example, an AI diary manager can only organise your diary if it can access that diary, edit it, and retain information about your activities.

Edit a diary? Retain the information? A diary IS a log of information as understood at the time. It's also not the clouds business, nor to be edited.

My gosh these people sound stupid.

jasonvorhe

a year ago

Never forget that most of Western governments pretty much run on Windows and Microsoft services.

drooopy

a year ago

How about you go back to making an OS that takes less than 10 GB of disk space, doesn't spy on me and is not filled with useless ads everywhere?

jerpint

a year ago

If these models could run offline, 100% locally, with expected privacy, Im up for it, i want to use a product, not be training data

GoblinSlayer

a year ago

Surely Cambridge Analytica showed you are a trainee now.

NoGravitas

a year ago

The headline feels like a threat.

GiorgioG

a year ago

I expect we’ll look back on this in 5 years and laugh our asses off. AI offers glimpses of brilliance and then sprinkles a bunch of turds around it. 60% of the time it works every time.

Mountain_Skies

a year ago

The only thing really keeping me on Windows now is Visual Studio. I know there are alternatives on Linux but for my particular work, there's no substitute for the actual full pro version of Visual Studio. But this non-stop parade of enshitification of Windows is really making me think about going back to Linux for my daily driver outside of work tasks. I don't want to have to keep up with what privacy invasion Microsoft has cooked up this week and keep track of the current way to opt-out, if that's even possible. Since first installing Slackware in the mid 90s, I've done several multi-year stints with Linux as my desktop OS, so it wouldn't be a completely alien change but in general I've found Windows to be a bit easier day-to-day and gets in the way less. All this AI and snapshotting garbage, on top of the existing telemetry, is adding up to be too much.

pixelpoet

a year ago

I wish they would give a shit that nobody wants this and actively hates it. Please fuck off with your AI trash, big tech :(

user

a year ago

[deleted]

agos

a year ago

I wonder if they realized how ominous it sounds

kaimac

a year ago

could be great news for linux adoption

JohnFen

a year ago

No no no. There is literally nothing about this that I find useful or acceptable, and a whole lot that I find dangerous and frightening. It's handing far too much power over to companies that I fundamentally don't trust.

I'm not getting on this train.

> AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives: that they can only be really helpful if they know the history and context behind what they are being tasked to do.

That cost is far too high.

xtiansimon

a year ago

First it was every online support had the idiot computer voice, Uh. Sorry. Please tell me again in a few words…

Now I’ve noticed all of these support services, once you get past the idiot computer, there is now an idiot human who rephrases your question or concerns to the point of stupidity, You’re calling because you’re having problems using the website…

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for sentiment analysis and an idiot computer telling me I sound frustrated, How are things at home? Are you having a bad day?

xarope

a year ago

MS Head of AI says there'll be more AI. News at 11.

In other news, MS Head of AI says Clippy is making a comeback...

voxadam

a year ago

Are we sure that Clippy isn't already the current head of AI at Microsoft?

guidedlight

a year ago

I don’t know why everyone is so concerned. Microsoft has been sending telemetry data and your photos to Microsoft for years.