I Don’t Want Your “AI”

Revisiting My Previous Thoughts on This Whole Tire Fire

Last fall I wrote about the whole “AI” garbage fire. Since then I’ve spent a decent amount of time playing with several different local LLMs using Ollama and LM Studio, attempted (with limited success) to integrate models with a language server for coding tasks, and tried using RAG with my plain text notebook files to summarize and index my own writings and DND notes.

None of my core conclusions from approximately 6 months ago have changed. I’ve found some (very) limited utility and I can see particularly how coding support could be helpful if the model is accurate, compared to searching and copying things from Stack Overflow. The promise of a local model to ingest, understand, and summarize data for later use is interesting, but my experiences actually trying it to date have not been particularly promising.

So let’s call this an area I find interesting, but not one I find that even remotely approaches the level of hype we see. But that’s all well and good. There are all kinds of tools out there, things are changing all the time, and you can do a lot locally if you have enough hardware. It’s not intelligent (clearly) but it has some uses. That’s not really what this post is about.

More specifically:

I Don’t Want Your “AI”

This is a message to Google, to Apple, to Microsoft, Adobe, and to anyone else trying to shove this stuff into their core software offerings (yes, I’m watching you too, Fedora). You need to stop. I don’t want your garbage. Stop shoving it onto my systems. Stop yelling at me to use it or to buy it.

I don’t need a new keyboard key, Microsoft. You disgust me. I don’t need you trying to take screenshots of everything I do in your ill-conceived Recall feature. I don’t want the built-in photo viewer to beg me to enable garbage-tier image generation with a popup when I’m just trying to page through my most recent batch of photographs to see if I’ve captured anything good.

Apple, how dare you demand I turn on “Apple Intelligence” with a software update? And how dare you try to turn it on again with a security update? This is completely unacceptable. How dare you do the same on my iPad? I don’t want your garbage so stop trying force it on me. Stop trying to waste my time and my storage on it.

I may avoid upgrading my aging iPhone again because it’s too old to support this so it can’t beg me to enable Apple Intelligence. Apple, seriously. I don’t want your “AI”. Stop pushing it on me like a desperate loser. Get out of here with your stupid AI fear of missing out. Your fears are not my problem, but now your pathetic response to them is. This is not ok.

Adobe, I am vehemently opposed to you begging me to use “AI” features in Acrobat when I’m just trying to read a PDF. And I almost certainly can’t upload that document to your servers like you want because it violates confidentiality agreements. So stop asking. Stop begging.

And that’s just it. As an end user I don’t want any of this, and I don’t know personally anyone who is asking for this. The people I know who find use in this stuff also know they want to choose their own tools and their own models that fit their specific needs, not this crap. But these vendors are so scared of being left behind that they are shoving this into software regardless of utility or fit, and they are begging us to use it. Interrupting our work to peddle garbage. It’s infuriating.

So hear me again, please. I’m begging you now. Stop pushing this on us. Please. I don’t want your “AI”.

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Hi, I’m Steve Block. I like to hike, cycle, and take pictures. Most of my writing is in a journal, though the best ideas find their way here. My photography is a long ongoing hobby. My main photo site is at ev-15.

— Steve