Tip for AI adherents: if you want people to use it, make it less cancerous.
I was on a board call last week where one of the board members was using read.ai to transcribe minutes. To read the minutes, I had to make a read.ai account.
Sure, whatever. So I made an account with my Google account.
Today, I log into an entirely different meeting with an entirely different person. Not signing in with Google at all.
You’ll never guess what happens. Via cookies in my browser, read.ai determines that I’m a Google user, and auto-injects itself — without permission, and without asking — to “transcribe” the meeting.
After the meeting, I get a note asking why I’d added an AI bot to the call. I hadn’t. I’m baffled.
It takes me — a reasonably competent person, with fairly good technical skills — 45 minutes to figure out what’s going on. That this venomous little company is creeping around my browser to creep into my calls with no explicit prompts or permissions.
Another straw on the camel’s back of AI being — from an end-user perspective — an intrusive, unhelpful, rapacious way to kill the environment and add absolutely nothing of value to our lives.
I’ve gone from being AI-curious a few years ago to viewing it as an actively negative force in my life. Every interaction with technology now comes with effort and debt to turn off unwanted “features,” bloatware, waste.
Nobody wants this. Nobody needs it. I pray, daily, that Ed Zitron is right and this fever dream bubble is about to collapse.
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