Eamonn Maguire, author of the Proton Scribe announcement post, responded to my tweet with this: https://x.com/...

We built this as an opt-in alternative to the non-privacy centric options on the market.

Our goal is always privacy by default, we want to make that possible in the GenAI world too given the number of businesses already using it, and the privacy risks other options pose.

When I worked in agencies you could pick the suits that had lost touch with reality by how much they seemed to believe that targeted ads are useful enough to be some kind of public service. Now google use the same rhetoric to justify user tracking

i like how he sees the "consent problem" as just a communication thing. "if they could speak, they would be saying yes"

I joined a writing meetup here in Amsterdam which gathers every week in a bar to write, to talk about their writing, to bounce ideas, etc. I kinda got tired of going because there were a worrying number of people using chatgpt to generate ideas. I was the only one trying to write non-fiction, and most of what I was writing would be crit of tech (sometimes genAI) so talking about my writing was always fun. But nonetheless, their use of chatgpt seemed extra weird because we were there, together, to write and support each other, for free.

It's strange to use solidarity, support, and just general helpfulness from others as an explanation for how AI opens writing up to classes or abilities when that's probably one of the top things that social media (and pre-social media social media) gave us on the internet.

anyway..

the usefulness of any feature should be measured in how deep you can bury its "opt-in" option in the settings pages without hurting its adoption

"it is providing Microsoft non-exclusive access to advanced learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems".

I wish it wasn't normal to call these "systems" instead of "products"

Is it absurd that the maker of a tech product controls it by writing it a list of plain language guidelines? or am I out of touch?

Maybe I’m scarred but I have a reflexive distrust for any usage of “pumped” or “super excited” in a commercial context. No matter the subject.

fyi they updated their blog post with this catch-all disclaimer in the last couple of hours

"it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse"

"so we're gonna play it safe and endorse it"

"learn AI now" is interesting in how much it is like the crypto "build it on chain" and how they are both different from something like "learn how to make a website".

Learning AI and Building on chain start with deciding which product you're going to base your learning/building on and which products you're going to learn to achieve that. Something that has no stability and never will. It's like saying "learn how to paint" because in the future everyone will be painting. It doesn't matter if you choose painting pictures on a canvas or painting walls in houses or painting cars, that's a choice left up to you.

"Learn how to make a website" can only be done on the web and, in the olden days, only with HTML.

"Learn AI now", just like "build it on chain" is nothing but PR to make products seem like legitimised technologies.

Fuckaduck, ai is the ultimate repulseware

They’re gonna start announcing real concrete nefarious-ass use cases real soon

sorry reminds me of this particular billboard ad that ran in Sydney. Just couldn’t make my brain interpret the “how did I get here?” in the positive sense they intended. Even the look on the girls face… it’s like sadness in her eyes. Anyway, there you go

I'm pretty confident they'll continue to roll out new stuff that, like the 4o release, are mild (if, at all) technical improvements made to seem massive by UI stuff that has almost nothing to do with AI. SJ's voice talking to you, bouncy animations, showing "reasoning" aka loading progress.

It’s so frustrating to see how egregious the future tense has become in all the talking about these products. Also the anticipation of a killer app is never going to sound not desperate.

Nope it isn’t. You blame AI companies for pollution they didn’t generate. Blame the energy sector.

don't talk about providing good counterarguments, please

We’re testing SearchGPT, a prototype of new search features designed to combine the strength of our AI models with information from the web to give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.

this is the most wishy washy distinction from chatgpt as a thing. Blatant throwing-shit-at-us-to-see-what-we-eat

from https://web.archive.org/...

not sure how legit that account is, actually. It's not the one I @'ed - this one was created in Jan 2024 - either it's his low-key alt or a bot

perhaps his plausible deniability account.

the thing about this is a "writing assistant" doesn't have to be integrated into the email product. It could be a product in itself. If the "business audience(?) was the most interested in a writing assistant" you've got a fucken great standalone product opportunity on your hands. A Proton-certified LLM writing assistant that is magically better and more secure than anything else out there is not something you coyly slip into the email client and nudge everyone to use.

It doesn't matter what reasons they have for doing this. Their method of deployment says more than enough to me. They know it's off-script and they know they want their fucken "audience" to do the marketing for them.

it's like little toy tugboats trying to steer the titanic around icebergs

Thing that sucks about this, despite how stupid a “forever” mouse concept is (that isn’t a project with titanium and replaceable parts) is that this is normal in the software realm. But the grift is so easily observable and absurd when it’s applied to hardware. It’s normal operations for SaaS. It’s what SaaS is.