I kind of hate AI generally, but I do use it for one thing: when I code (by hand!), I use it as a “turbo manpage” - meaning it’s documentation that understands fairly well what I’m looking for instead of being passive documents I have to read.
But I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t make life easier so much because it comes up with the technical tidbits I need quicker, but because I don’t have to deal with the hassle of visiting a dozen technical websites and dodge their numerous trackers, ads and other pointless Javascript eye-candy and other nonsense. Not to mention, I don’t have to download megabytes of crud just to read a two-line technical post - not that bandwidth is expensive nowadays, mind you…
So for instance, let’s say I have this weird problem with a C library: pre-AI, I’d search the error message (preferably not with Google, but sometimes with Google if the problem was obscure enough), and it would give me a bunch of links to Reddit, Superuser, GitHub… And then I’d visit each of those sites, unblocking their stupid abusive scripts one by one in uBlock Origin until they rendered something readable with the information I wanted to read in it somewhere. Over and over and over again, until I found the problem.
With AI, I ask it what the error message is, and it goes out and browses the sites for me. It’s not my browser going there, it’s duck.ai’s crawler, and I don’t have to deal with the abuse from the pages I used to visit myself because AI does it for me.
Those sites complain loudly that AI is killing their traffic and their advertising revenue. But you know what? After reflecting on their plight, well… cry me a fucking river. Visiting most of those sites is like chronic pain: you live with it because you have to, but the moment it stops, you realize just how painful it is when it starts again.
I do sympathize with the few sites that aren’t (too) abusive. But all the others can fuck right off: they don’t get to track me - at least provided I’m careful with what I ask AI - and they don’t get to ram their ads down my throat.
Of course it’s far from ideal: now I’m tracked by a single actor - the AI agent and its operator - and it’s really unnerving. But at least it’s more comfortable than browsing the regular web. But I do try to ask it only generic questions with non-identifiable information in my questions.
You say that as if Microsoft had ever behaved morally or decently, or treated its customers respectfully at any point in its half-century history…