We very much differ in optimism I think. I expect model-driven UIs to end up the same as software and services today: you can use open, non-hostile options if you go out of your way, but most people use the offerings from the big corporations and if you want a friction-free experience you have to as well.
I would love to use a third-party Instagram app that only shows posts from accounts I follow, but I can’t because Facebook has locked that down. I can just as easily see a future where I can summarise my feed, but only if I use the Metabot or whatever which is just implementing some different dark pattern.
Although that does bring me back somewhat to my initial point in that it all feels like brute forcing our way out of problems instead of solving them. We could have a Facebook that shows a nice summary of your family photos, we could have a shopping search engine that doesn’t include the trash, we could have short and to the point videos that aren’t optimising for the engagement flavour of the month.
We don’t because there are too many financial incentives pushing back and too many established players that can burn piles of money for much longer than you, and I just do not see how those same facets won’t just be translated for models.
> I would love to use a third-party Instagram app that only shows posts from accounts I follow, but I can’t because Facebook has locked that down
The point is that this is a local model. You don't have to use Meta's AI because Meta can't stop you from running a model on your own computer to browse Instagram for you and filter it however you like.
Personally I think that, if "model-driven browsing" (for lack of a better term) does take off, we'll see mitigations against it. Not unlike how we currently see mitigations (of mixed effectiveness) against ad-blockers and using things like Puppeteer as scraping tools.
I'm sorry to be so pessimistic about it, and I genuinely do hope we see some positives out of this stuff. But I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with what so much of the software industry has become, and seeing how much of the AI space is led or backed by the tech giants, I can't help but assume the worst.
I would love to use a third-party Instagram app that only shows posts from accounts I follow, but I can’t because Facebook has locked that down. I can just as easily see a future where I can summarise my feed, but only if I use the Metabot or whatever which is just implementing some different dark pattern.
Although that does bring me back somewhat to my initial point in that it all feels like brute forcing our way out of problems instead of solving them. We could have a Facebook that shows a nice summary of your family photos, we could have a shopping search engine that doesn’t include the trash, we could have short and to the point videos that aren’t optimising for the engagement flavour of the month.
We don’t because there are too many financial incentives pushing back and too many established players that can burn piles of money for much longer than you, and I just do not see how those same facets won’t just be translated for models.