[I literally had this thought in the shower this morning so please don’t gatekeep me lol.]

If AI was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved your face by every product. People would just use it.

Imagine if printers were new and every piece of software was like “Hey, I can put this on paper for you” every time you typed a word. That would be insane. Printing is a need, and when you need to print, you just print.

  • akacastor@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 days ago

    The Internet was pushed on everyone. AOL and all other ISPs would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited. You’d buy a new PC and there would be a link to AOL on the desktop.

    Are you 15? If so, you might read this and believe the above is true. Those of us elderly folks who lived through the 80s and 90s laugh at this AI shill propaganda.

    They “would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited” - yeah, that was called advertising, because there was huge consumer demand and a race to be the company to meet that demand. AOL sent CDs (incredibly inexpensive to manufacture) as advertising hoping consumers would choose AOL instead of the competition, by making AOL the easiest choice - consumers already had the required software (software distribution was a challenge in this time before internet was ubiquitous).

    The dot com boom was not the claim of a new technology being pushed onto consumers, the dot com boom was the opposite - a new technology existed and consumers were embracing it, and many companies speculated on how to gain ownership of markets as they shifted online. (The following bust was fueled by over-ambitious speculation on scales and timeframes.)

    Anyway, AOL mailing CDs was late in the era, it was much better when they were mailing floppy disks we could reuse.

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 day ago

      Those of us elderly folks who lived through the 80s and 90s laugh at thisr AI shill propaganda.

      Dude. I’m not only old but I worked for Vint Cerf and later was president of one of the companies mass mailing CD’s to everyone. I ran so many commercials on TV that I had a customer call up and say, “please stop!” Sports stadiums were named after ISPs. Road names were changed to names of ISPs. It was a massive advertising push because people were buying. The only thing that has outstripped Internet adoption rates is AI adoption rates which is why there’s an even bigger advertising push.

      I have tried AI but don’t generally use it. I don’t use Facebook either. But I’m not going to pretend people don’t use Facebook because I don’t like it and don’t use it.