Software vendors… supercharge their apps with AI. But why?

13 June 2024

This is a disturbing trend, vendors of software and apps, in particular those that have been around for years, suddenly introducing AI functionality. Indeed, whose idea was this?

What Apple announced looks like more of the same that’s been offered lately. Help writing emails that don’t need to be written, bad generative images that look little better than anything else on the market and a dubious integration with OpenAI which feels super weird given the former’s much marketed stance on privacy and the latter’s dubious respect for anyone’s data.

An app I use to read PDF documents, is an example. I just want to read PDF files… I don’t need help from an AI assistant for that. I’ve barely blinked at the feature so far, but who knows, maybe I should.

Perhaps the AI helper, will, like some book reading apps, scan the document, and return a summary of its contents, sparing the need to read it in full. Now that I think about it: no, I won’t find out if that’s one of the AI assistant’s purposes. That seems like a slippery-slope to me.