Since Brian hadn’t already cancelled Google for being awful in every other way, this is exactly the push he needs to stop giving them money and switch to better, cheaper options.
Paying for corpotrash.
Time to cancel then.
Wtf is google offering that you’re paying for anyway? advertising?
It was always the case that AI would be free or cheap to begin with, and it was always the case that prices will have to rise to cover their costs.
The way now is to cancel subscriptions. Show the companies pushing AI that there is no money to be made in it. Find another service that fits your needs, your ethical minimum, and your budget.
Cancel Google services, even the free ones, and find an alternative you truly like.
they could make it when you opt out from AI features, you dont need to pay for the AI features. but they are Greedy so they will probably not do that.
They wouldn’t be able to make MONEY off of AI, otherwise, cause most people would decline it.
Dont use subscription services.
Pay for services that respect their users
FTFY
Proton mail, mullvad, bitwarden to name a few
Lots of victim-blaming in these comments
Nobody is forcing them to use Google services. And under capitalism voting with our wallets is all we got.
Use Microsoft 365
Out of all the options, you somehow landed on the one thing that’s actually worse. I’m genuinely kind of impressed.
Nah, y’all just like to screech at MS while ignoring that the office is by far the most complete product in that space.
But I guess MS has brainwashed hundreds of millions business and it’s actually trash 🙄.
It’s so painfully obvious when folks who have no experience in this area screech about M365.
Ok, but if the goal is “avoid paying for AI I don’t want”, M365 is worse. They were one of the first companies to start bundling it into every license tier available.
They didn’t immediately raise their prices when they started bundling it, but it’s the same tactic of using whatever tricks they can to inflate user numbers of AI.
Edit: In agreement with your main point though. Lots of angry people on lemmy who aren’t the target audience for MS products and don’t actually use it who make a ton of noise about it.
I can use libre office which gets all my needs done, I see that as complete.
Do you run a business? Do you need an IdP and role based access? Do you need to back up emails and documents from your employees? Do you need IT insurance to cover your ass or have compliance needs?
Then maybe you aren’t the primary audience for these tools.
I work it for an organization with roughly 3000 people, and we have compliance needs. Ones that may conflict with Microsoft automatically backing up excel files with SSNs that are being worked on to an off premise cloud 2000 miles away.
Use LibreOffice and some more independent cloud services!
Why do they all act like AI is the holy grail ?? Phone update: here you go, AI. New app: here you go. AI. Websites: here you go. AI.
I’ve tried it, but AI sucks. All tech questions give non-working answers. Everything else, the AI always agree with you.
They’ve invested way too much to admit it’s almost totally useless, and only useful in niche app, using sketchy conditions (training material IP…) and under tight control.
So they engage into heavy marketing and comms ops to convince the world that “AI” (very vague term BTW, what they offer right now should rather be called systems resulting from stochastic learning, credit for that naming suggestion is not on me) was a revolution and whoever doesn’t get on board will be left behind in the dust.
It worked really well: corporate world is embracing the “AI everywhere” idea.
So now, everyone is competing to provide “the best AI assistant”. And believe it or not: some people do ask for it!
Because AI is a solution in search of a problem. The current plan is to just put it in everything and hope one of them is better as a result. It’s not the worst plan, because eventually some combination of things is likely to be useful, but it means a lot of useless shit will be slapped together. Of course it’s also far from a great plan, because it means a lot of useless shit will e slapped together.
