I keep seeing this everywhere, and I had to go to Great lengths to remove co-pilot from my windows 11 on my current PC once I upgraded. Had to use a bloatware removal script to forcibly get that thing the hell off there. Now I’m seeing ads on Amazon and other places about PCs being bundled with copilot AI. I have tried using co-pilot myself, it is completely worthless. That thing is a hot piece of garbage, and somehow, works even worse than chat GPT. Like, that is truly impressive, because Chat GPT has degraded in quality over time and now they are in the news often for various controversies, the latest being a complaint about how they can’t survive without stealing copyrighted content…
Who in their right mind is hoping to get a copilot powered PC???
Nobody hopes for it, but the average user just wants A PC™, and they don’t know that they have a choice in the matter.
It’s up to the rest of us to help the average user in our lives make informed choices.
Every PC will be using AI as we move forward and thinking they won’t seems as head in the sand to me as thinking the Internet would be a fad. Remember how awful the Internet was in the 80s and 90s? AI is in a similar spot today.
Why would I read a manual when I can ask an AI to summarize it and give me pages so I can confirm? If I’m trying to do a task I know a million people have solved like Python code to translate XLSX and CSV to JSON and back, why wouldn’t I use AI for that?
Trusting AI outright and not reviewing the answers is silly, but doing research with AI is soooo much faster. Also the majority of articles and manuals you find online written in the past year used AI and you can have CoPilot spit it out to you WITH the original sources that the website/blog hides.
The idea that AI isn’t trustworthy is silly, because no one is trustworthy. You should always have been double checking things for yourself, but sitting and struggling through something for 2 days is foolish when AI could do 80% of the work for you in seconds.
Most of people do not know what is a bloatware and do not care, they will simply continue to do what the trend and ads are telling them to do.
So if Amazon (or other GAMAM) wants to create a new need, most of people will follow. And in a fews years people like you (or me !) we will be considered outcasts. 😁
we will be considered outcasts
Speak for yourself, I’m already considered an outcast.
Does Amazon really think anyone out there wants a PC with AI bloatware on it?
Setting aside this particular situation and software package and speaking more-generally as to preinstalled bloatware…
People have been buying PCs for a long time with bloatware on it offsetting the price of the PC, so I’m pretty sure that people either are fine with bloatware or unaware of it sufficiently not to take it into account when buying a PC.
Why even “up” grade in the firstplace? I’m keeping some of my windows systems at 10 due to bullshit hardware restrictions and others because I see no meaningful appeal to this cancerous platform.
Good morning sir/ma’am I’m here to tell you about our Lord and Savior Linus Torvalds. He sacrificed his wallet to bring you a free and open operating systems. We don’t judge what flavor of Linux you use. As long as you agree that Linus saved us from Bill Gates who stole ancient secrets from the ruins of Xerox Parc and has since embraced the evil that is bloat ware.
Through Linux you can be saved!
It seems unlikely to me that Amazon doesn’t have very good data on whether their marketing works in their favour or not.
It’s just a sidebar (for now) and it’s up-to-date on internet information, unlike ChatGPT. It’s free GPT 4 on a search engine.
The Lemmy user base is so out of touch with the average consumer.
I love how 70% of subsequent comments are tech savvy Lemmings describing what average users are really like, based on how in touch with them they are.
It’s self-selecting. In order to be here in the first place, you have to give a shit enough to ignore the big corporate social media sites in favor of finding and using this one.
Do you mean out of touch as in unaware or diverging opinions?
The Lemmy user base is so out of touch with the average consumer.
This is probably true. I don’t know many people who aren’t super heavy into tech, I’ve had a gaming PC half my life, but I do have a couple friends who don’t even have a laptop, PC, computer, or anything. They just have a phone. I don’t know how they get by.
Most people don’t care, they won’t even notice sadly. They will walk into Best Buy, get swarmed by 3 sales people, tell them, “I’m looking for a new laptop.”
And the sales people will take them straight over to the laptop section which is all filled with the latest Microsoft swill and sell them one of them.
There will be no discussion of privacy, no discussion of Microsoft’s recent scandals, no discussion of alternatives. They will parrot whatever Microsoft’s talking points are, “it’s safe, encrypted, secure, fast, etc…”
If we want consumers to care, we have to reach them before they buy their new upgrade. This often starts with your family and close friends. You need to inform them, you need to tell them there is a better way.
This is how I got my parents switched from Windows 10 to Linux. They were asking me to help with their computer problems, (10 year old computer that was pretty low-power when it was new.)
I told them that Windows 10 was EoL next year and their hardware was way to old to upgrade. I said that I could put on Linux which would be much faster, more secure and private, wouldn’t require a new computer, and would do everything they needed. My mom was nervous, but I went over everything her and my dad used it for, (browsing, email, Word and printing, PDF reading, Turbo Tax, and Spotify.)
Only slight pain point was getting my mom onto Turbo Tax cloud. But she is slightly tech savvy, so it wasn’t too bad.
They’ve been on it for about 9 months now and it works great. Their computer is much snappier, and I don’t have to worry about them getting viruses, (my dad is 0% tech savvy and will click on almost any link he sees.)
Nobody wants it and if amazon/google/microsoft/facebook would be honest about what it really does, the overwhelming majority would decline it in a heartbeat. But corporations do what corporations do best and consumers take it with a shrug. And I kind of get it. Life is too short to learn about everything and make the most informed choice on everything. Often you just shrug it off and never really use it.
