#oneaday Day 179: Your occasional reminder that AI can fuck off

I saw a TV ad for “Apple Intelligence” yesterday. The concept of the ad is that someone is angry someone at their workplace keeps stealing their pudding — hahaha, so hilarious and cosy and relatable — and writes them a furious email. They then click the “Friendly” button on Apple Intelligence and the email is rewritten to be the most milquetoast, handwringy, insincere thing you’ve ever seen. And this is supposed to be a selling point.

Elsewhere, a YouTuber I know had someone in their comments getting pissy about how they pronounced “ZX81”, and, presumably in an attempt to further their argument, the commenter in question then copy-pasted a ChatGPT conversation — without editing out the “ChatGPT says:” bits — that didn’t even particularly help their cause.

I keep seeing YouTube thumbnails made with AI art-stealing machines. Coca-Cola made a Christmas ad with AI. The memorial lunch for beloved broadcaster Steve Wright had an invitation that was made with AI. Entire websites are made of AI slop. And even here in fucking WordPress, I can’t escape the sodding “Generate with AI” button.

I fucking hate it. I want it to go away. I want people who say “but it’s good for summarising things” to drown in the sea. I want people who say “but it’s better than doctors at diagnosing problems!” to be the victims of the worst malpractice the medical industry has ever seen. I wish eternal loneliness and desolation on those who use it to write emails. And I want it out of the pieces of software I use on a daily basis.

We’re even starting to get accounts on BlueSky that pretend to be real people, but simply respond with ChatGPT answers that are tuned to be deliberately argumentative. What is the fucking point of all this shit? How is it benefiting humanity and productivity in any way whatsoever?

It isn’t. All it’s doing is continuing to make tech worse, year on year, while keeping oblivious shareholders — who aren’t interested in anything but seeing “growth” — happy that companies are providing supposed “new innovations” that actually don’t provide any sort of useful functionality whatsoever.

I’m aware I’m ranting incoherently, but honestly right now it feels like it’s pointless to even try and come up with a cogent argument. This shit is infesting everything, and it’s becoming impossible to escape from. And I legitimately do not understand how anyone can possibly think this shit is in any way better than what we had before.

I guess the one upside is that with how much AI is being used pointlessly to provide “summaries” of Google Searches, YouTube videos and other such shite, the planet will burn down all the sooner, so eventually we won’t have to worry about it at all. Then the Great Thinkers of the day — assuming anyone survives — can stroke their chins for two hundred years about “where it all went wrong”.

Here. Here is where it all went wrong.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 156: A reminder that automated moderation solutions suck

Hello. Bit of a serious one today. Many of you reading this will likely be familiar with the YouTube channel RoseTintedSpectrum. He has suffered an extremely unfortunate happening today in that YouTube has seen fit to completely obliterate his entire channel. Their reasoning? He supposedly violated their policies about “spam, scams and deceptive practices”. Needless to say, he did not.

For the unfamiliar, RoseTintedSpectrum is someone who’s been doing YouTube for a few years now. As the name of his channel suggests, he started out doing videos about old Spectrum games, and his dry humour and cynical wit won him a small but dedicated following of folks who enjoyed what he put out. Over time, he branched out into a niche that is somewhat underserved: providing commentary on “classic” TV shows, beginning with ITV’s show about video games and computer culture, Bad Influence. Most recently, he has been doing huge retrospectives on the legendary GamesMaster, and these videos caused his channel to have a huge and well-deserved surge in popularity.

Well, they did, anyway. For reasons known only to YouTube’s automated moderation algorithm, his channel has now been banished to the shadow realm, and he is unable to get a human response out of anyone. He attempted to appeal the “decision” and got a negative response back within 5 minutes, suggesting that no human being has been involved at any step in this process. And they have the gall to say on Twitter that “these decisions are made very carefully” and “thoughtfully”. Are they fuck.

If all this sounds a little familiar, it’s very similar to what happened with me and WordPress.com a while back — the reason this blog is now self-hosted rather than hosted with WordPress.com. That was almost the exact same situation: my hard work of many years (nearly 20 in my case!) was accidentally and incorrectly branded as “spam”, and immediately removed from circulation without warning or any attempt to contact me. Thankfully, my repeated badgering and yelling at WordPress.com meant that it was back up and running again the next day, but the whole situation spurred me on to move my blog off-site.

There’s a key difference there, though; while I could do that with my blog, YouTubers do not have that luxury. People who make videos are pretty much locked in to YouTube for life, because self-hosting videos is completely unworkable from both a storage space and bandwidth perspective. There are other video-hosting solutions out there, but they all have issues — no-one gives a shit about Vimeo (particularly now it’s branded itself as “AI-powered”) and Rumble is full of the absolute worst shitheads on the planet. So for most folks, it’s YouTube or nothing.

I want to emphasise this key point: it is completely unacceptable for automated moderation tools to have the power to take a creator’s hard work offline without even attempting to contact them. It is completely unacceptable that this occurs without any human input whatsoever. And it is completely unacceptable for YouTube’s support team, when contacted about this issue, to say there is “nothing more they can do” because the automated appeal response to the automated channel deletion decided within less than five minutes that no mistakes had been made at any point in the automation process.

If a channel is flagged as being in violation of some sort of policy, that should be an immediate signal for an actual human to look at it. It should have taken anyone human less than five minutes to determine that there was nothing on RoseTintedSpectrum’s channel even remotely related to “spam, scams or deceptive practices”, and this whole situation should have never happened in the first place.

But no. Because big corpos like Google are all-in on AI and automation, they trust the clearly and demonstrably fallible machines to handle it all themselves — including any attempts to appeal the decisions. And the result is situations like we have now, where a dedicated and hard-working creative type is left with absolutely nothing to show for years of hard graft.

RoseTintedSpectrum puts an unbelievable amount of effort into each and every video he has ever made, and that should be abundantly clear to any human being looking at his channel.

But sadly, because no human being at YouTube has looked at his channel, we’re left with the situation we’re in now. Which is completely unacceptable.

If you’re still clinging on to your Twitter account in the vain hope that the last week or so has all been a bad dream, I urge you to contact @TeamYouTube and @YouTubeLiaison over there to let them know they have made a huge mistake — RoseTintedSpectrum’s YouTube account, if you want to copy that in, also, is @SpectrumTinted. With any luck, this will all be resolved sooner rather than later.

And if you’re reading this and happen to be in any sort of position to make big decisions at your place of work: automated moderation solutions are fucking bad and should always have human oversight. So don’t fucking delete people’s hard work before you even attempt to contact them.

Sort it out, YouTube.

#oneaday Day 144: Are we fucked?

With each passing day, I feel like it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the feeling that we, the humans, are completely and utterly fucked.

And I mean this in a variety of ways. For one, it’s impossible to ignore the wilful ignorance “big tech” is demonstrating in the current “AI” gold rush. After years of getting things like carbon emissions and sustainable energy production into a good place — likely far too late, but still, the effort was happening — it seems all the big players in the tech space have just gone “haha! Fuck that, we’ve got a new toy, and bollocks to the frankly unnecessary amount of energy it consumes to power it”.

And this is about the third or fourth energy-inefficient tech gold rush at this point, after cryptocurrency and NFTs. The one thing those things and “AI” have in common is that they’re hawked by people who are completely unable to explain how their supposed benefits outweigh the absurd cost in resources required to use them. At worst, they’re used as outright scams.

AI is even worse at this point. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen several adverts for “AI”. Not an AI product, not a revolutionary and groundbreaking use case for AI… just adverts for “we are a tech company and we’re doing… something… with AI because every other fucker is”. It is absolutely telling that not one of these adverts has been able to depict AI doing anything remotely useful, and that none of them even attempt to explain why AI is a good thing. Because, as most people who have been paying attention will know at this point, there is no product.

Seriously. There is no compelling use case for AI that isn’t already covered in a more energy-efficient format by existing tech.

Want to find information? Search engines exist, both for the whole Web and within a single site.

Want to write code? Well, you’d better learn, because ChatGPT is going to spit out bullshit that is full of errors that you won’t know how to spot without knowing how to code.

Need an image? There are billions of images online, many of which are royalty free or suitable for use via fair use provisions. There are free art packages available. And there are lots of artists who will draw whatever the hell you want — yes, even that — if you give them some money.

Can’t write an email? Bullshit you can’t. If you can write a ChatGPT prompt you can write a fucking email. Stop being a lazy cunt.

Need AI to “summarise” something for you? Just read the fucking thing, it’s not hard, and as a species we’ve spent several thousand years mastering that basic skill.

So that’s a concern, both for the environmental impact and for how it will affect the job market. I’m also rather concerned about how medicine seems to be super-keen to use AI rather than, you know, human doctors. I’m sure that’s going to be a fun few lawsuits in the near future.

And outside of all this nonsense, we have the current state of world politics, particularly the US. I have friends in the States who are — quite rightly, I feel — legitimately terrified about what the upcoming election will result in. And while I thought people were overreacting somewhat back in 2016 when this situation last presented itself, having seen how utterly deranged Trump and his most obsequious sycophants are behaving in the run-up to this election… yeah. I get it.

So the inevitable conclusion to all this is to find myself sitting alone in a hotel room asking myself “are we fucked?” Cause I think we might be, y’know. I think we might be.

#oneaday Day 76: Nopegrade

I’m due a phone upgrade. This is probably the first time I’ve come to that point and haven’t been tempted to immediately get a new shiny phone. And the reason? So many of the latest models appear to be absolutely rammed to the gills with “AI” features I don’t want anything to do with.

And it’s a shame, because some of these phones do otherwise look good. The Google Pixel 9 looks like it has an excellent camera, for example, and that’s pretty high up my list of priorities these days. The newest Samsung devices also look quite nice, and having had a Samsung device for my last couple of phones, I’d be quite happy to go with them.

If it wasn’t for the bloody AI crap, that is. I know I could just “not use it”, but that’s not really the point. I don’t really want to send any sort of message that AI junk is something that I’m interested in in the slightest, and my concern is people happily jumping on with Google Pixel 9 and “just trying out” Gemini will just prolong the amount of time we all have to suffer with AI garbage being jammed into places we don’t want it.

I’m sure there are some “valid” uses for AI, but honestly, I don’t really see the usefulness right now. Earlier on, I watched a Marques Brownlee review of the Google Pixel 9, and everything that was “AI-powered” seemed very superfluous and unnecessary. An on-phone image generator? Cool, now I can steal artwork wherever I am in the world! An assistant I can talk to about what I should do about a wasp infestation? I’d rather talk to a real person that doesn’t hallucinate, thanks. The ability to turn on my lights with my voice? 1) I can already do that with several other devices and 2) I don’t want to do that. The ability to insert myself into a photo I wasn’t in? Cool, now I can create “memories” of things that didn’t actually happen. I’m sure that’s healthy.

It’s the voice stuff that really gets me. I genuinely do not understand how any of that is desirable. How is getting an Amazon Alexa, Google Gemini or whatever to read out your email headers better than tapping on the email icon and looking at them? How is getting a device to give you a “daily briefing” better than just doing a quick round of your favourite websites to check on the headlines? How is bellowing “SET A TIMER FOR THREE MINUTES… no, THREE minutes. THREE. MINUTES.” better than going to the clock app and typing the number “3”?

It isn’t. These things are all gimmicks. They’re not actually useful. The grand dream is presumably some sort of omniscient, omnipresent Star Trek-style capital-C Computer that we can call upon to dispense its knowledge and information wherever we are at any time of day. But we’re not there yet. We’re not even close to being there yet, with how unreliable and hallucination-prone modern AI still is. And if reports are to be believed, we’ve already pretty much hit a cap on how good the current “AI” tech can get, because the various models are already starting to feed on themselves, making hallucinations more likely, not less likely, as they inadvertently guzzle up AI-generated swill rather than material that has had a human involved at any point during its creation.

And it disgusts me to see how many publishing companies are gleefully signing up to feed their writers’ work into ChatGPT, almost certainly without consulting the actual writers for their consent beforehand. Today it was Condé Nast. Previously it was Vox Media. And I’m sure there’s a lot more all over the place, too.

I cannot wait for this odious trend to be over. And I suspect it will be over within a few years, as the money is almost certainly going to run out. None of these models are sustainable; none of them have a “killer app” that convinces naysayers that actually, AI might be quite good after all; none of them even really have a marketable product beyond “look at this thing that might one day be able to do something vaguely useful (but doesn’t just yet)”.

The sooner that fucking sparkly magic icon goes away, the better.

#oneaday Day 53: Our AI-powered dystopian garbage future

I was unfortunately exposed to this video today:

For those who quite understandably can’t bring themselves to watch it based on the thumbnail and source alone, it’s a video about how a dad is super-proud of his daughter and her athletics ability, but how he also knows that his daughter idolises an Olympic athlete. All seemingly wholesome and nice on the surface, until the main point of the ad: the Dad gets Google Gemini (which is Google’s ChatGPT-esque chatbot interface) to write the athlete in question a “fan letter” that is supposedly from his daughter.

It’s difficult to know exactly where to start with how fucked up this is. But I think as good a place as any is to point out that written communication between people has always been a means of direct, personal contact — particularly if it’s via what is seen as a medium that takes a bit more effort, such as a handwritten letter. Of course, chances are that if the “fan letter” ever made it to the athlete in question, any response would probably be a carefully vetted template from a PR representative rather than the athlete herself, which sticks something of a pin in the “direct, personal contact” thing, but that’s no reason that regular people who aren’t PR consultants should auto-generate things that are supposed to be personal.

If someone inspires you, you presumably respect them. And if you respect them, you should demonstrate that respect by making an appropriate effort when attempting to contact them. And getting an AI to write a fan letter for you is the height of disrespect. It tells the recipient that you don’t even respect them enough to communicate with them in your own words. It tells them that you would rather get a machine to handle your communication than “waste time” writing things yourself.

“But what about people who aren’t able to write?” you may ask. To that I would point out that in order to get Google Gemini to write something, you still have to write a fucking prompt for it, and if you’re capable of doing that you’re capable of writing a letter. They teach how to do that in primary school. At least they used to.

There are myriad other ways to get your point across without getting garbage generative AI involved, even if you’re incapable of holding a pen or typing on a keyboard. There’s voice recognition, allowing you to still communicate in your own words without typing. Or you can get someone to help you — remember other people? Remember how to speak to them? Or do you need ChatGPT for that too? I’m a socially anxious autistic recluse and I can still talk to a person if I absolutely have to, and on more than one occasion I have sent some form of personal message to someone who genuinely inspires me, all in my own words.

We absolutely should not normalise the use of AI to craft even form responses to emails. I used to get mildly offended when a pal of mine used the “auto-respond” text message facility on his phone, which would send a rather blunt “Answer is YES” or “Answer is NO” SMS on his behalf if he couldn’t be bothered to type a full message, but at least in that instance I know he had at least read my message and considered whether to respond in the affirmative or negative.

AI zealots seem to think that garbage like this is going to revolutionise communication between human beings, making it “more efficient” or some such bullshit. But all it’s going to do is remove any semblance of personality from an individual’s method of communication with you — something which is already somewhat at risk as a result of the homogenisation of culture brought about by the Internet. Look at how many people fall back on the same memes and turn of phrase these days rather than communicating in their own individual fashion, using their background and location as a means of making their communication unique. Now imagine even that layer of personalisation being taken away, with everyone “communicating” with one another using that smug, pretentious tone all AI chatbots appear to have developed.

“You’re just resistant to change!” Yes, I am, if that “change” is demonstrably harmful to the way we interact with one another and our culture in general. Anyone who uses AI to communicate with someone rather than drafting an email, chat message or social media post themselves is an inconsiderate, disrespectful asshole, and I will absolutely not shift my opinion on this. I will, however, point and laugh.

So fuck off with your “Gemini” garbage, Google. And Mr Man’s little girl? Tell your father to go fuck himself, punch him in the balls hard enough that he doesn’t have any more children, and go write something yourself, with a pen. I can guarantee that your idol Sydney will find that far more meaningful and emotionally worthwhile than what is effectively a form letter that you didn’t even write the prompt for.

#oneaday Day 33: The Latest Horrifying News from the World of AI

Yesterday, the tech blog 404 Media reported on a horrifying development in the story of the World Wide Web’s gradual decline into AI-encrusted unusability: the apparent resurrection of the once-beloved TUAW (aka The Unofficial Apple Weblog), a site that hasn’t been active for 10+ years, into an AI-powered slop machine.

To make matters worse, the new owners of the twitching corpse of TUAW have apparently seen fit to “borrow” the identities of the site’s former regular contributors, replacing their original headshots with AI-generated portraits or stock images of completely unrelated people and replacing their original archived work with AI-powered “summaries”.

Naturally, the former TUAW writers are not all that happy about this. One of the affected individuals, Christina Warren, pointed out that the reason this has been done in the first place is likely “an SEO scam that won’t even work in 2024 because Google changed its [algorithm]”. She then concluded that those responsible were “Assholes!”, which I thoroughly concur with.

This is just the latest in a long line of absolute bullshit brought about by the infestation of “AI” into everything online. There is absolutely no excuse, no justification for what has gone here. Not only is it defacing the legacy of a publication that was once loved — and trusted — by a significant number of readers, it’s also destroying the portfolios of the writers in question, who are now saddled with AI-generated slop that has their name attached to it.

“I don’t want people to come across the contents coming out of that site and think that I actually wrote like that [very poorly],” Warren told 404. And I can’t help but agree — because we have a very real problem online in that sites shuttering often means vast swathes of work by talented writers just goes in the dustbin without warning. And while sites such as the incredible, wonderful archive.org do their best to keep a record of everything that once was, the sad reality is that a lot of stuff is just plain lost.

I know, because I’ve been on the receiving end of it multiple times.

My stuff might be in here… somewhere… maybe?

One of the first sites I ever wrote for professionally, Kombo.com, no longer exists, and its URL now redirects to a site called “GameZone”. Surprisingly, GameZone does seem to have some of Kombo’s old articles archived, though none of them are under their original byline, instead all attributed to “kombo” (lower-case). There are 28,435 articles attributed to “kombo”, all with the wrong dates on them — they claim to date back to 2012, but there are some with the headline “E3 2010”, suggesting that they were simply republished on the “newer” site in 2012 — and no means of identifying who wrote what. As such, it’s useless for me to use as part of a portfolio.

The two “big” sites I wrote for, GamePro and USgamer, also went belly-up at various points. In both cases, again, some of my work ended up archived on other sites. In the case of GamePro, some of my stuff found its way to the American tech site PC World, but a search for my name now throws up a list of useless garbage that quotes my name but doesn’t actually link to anything I wrote without manually scrolling through several pages of junk. And, of course, there’s no link to my byline for me to easily find everything by me, despite my byline being right there on the articles in question when I can find them!

This is the one and only GamePro article by me I could find after a few minutes of searching. It appears on page 2,689 of a defunct archives page. None of the images or links in the article remained intact.

USgamer, which folded a little more recently, fares a little better in that I actually have an author page on VG247, where the articles ended up — although said author page has no picture, no bio and a link to a Twitter account that no longer exists. There’s 8 pages of material from me, which I suspect isn’t all of my work from USgamer, but it’s a decent amount, at least. I just wish it wasn’t on VG247, which is a site I am… not a fan of.

Better than nothing — or being “AI summarised”, at least. Just wish it was under a different masthead.

In this respect, I guess I’m actually kind of lucky that my identity hasn’t been co-opted by a content farm and all my past work fed into ChatGPT to regurgitate at considerably lower quality than I originally wrote. But I have to confess that reading stories such as this one about TUAW fills me with genuine dread. I’m not overly concerned about AI “taking my job” because it’s rapidly becoming very clear that AI writing is both easy to spot and demonstrably inferior to a human being doing the same thing.

But I am concerned about the potential for AI slop with my name attached to it dragging my reputation through the mud. As a writer, I find it grossly insulting to my profession. And simply as a human being, I find what has been done here to be absolutely, totally unconscionable.

There has to be a breaking point somewhere. Soon. Please. I am rapidly running out of what little faith in humanity I have left. And there wasn’t a lot left in the first place.

#oneaday Day 19: The AI Rot

Look at this bastard little icon. You probably see it every day right now. Hell, I see it every time I pop open the WordPress toolbar, because Automattic, makers of WordPress and Jetpack (back-end technology that helps WordPress sites do what they do) are cramming it in absolutely fucking everywhere, just like every other tech company is right now. No-one asked for this, no-one wants it, no-one is happy with the results it produces.

And yet, look at that bastard little icon. Such promise it carries in its little sparkly starbursts! The suggestion that magic is about to happen! The implication that, were you just to click that bastard little icon, creativity will be magically produced from nothing, allowing you to truly express yourself without any of that pesky “thinking”! You will truly be once and for all free!

As a creative type, naturally I object to generative AI being jammed in everywhere that it doesn’t belong. I’ll admit to having found some uses of it potentially interesting — music generation is intriguing, feeling like a step onwards from a program we used to have on the Atari ST called “Band In A Box” — but whatever use case I come across, it’s hard to shake the feeling that its only real use is to enable laziness, and to prevent having to pay a real person for doing the creative work that is their specialism. (The actual computing and environmental cost of such tech doesn’t matter to AI zealots, of course.)

That’s not to say there’s no money in AI, mind; no, by golly, the big tech companies are falling over themselves to hoover up investor cash right now, and every big generative AI site features some sort of predatory monetisation system, usually involving “credits” that obfuscate how much you’re actually paying, and/or “monthly” subscriptions that are actually charged annually, because apparently that’s just a thing you can lie about now and no-one calls you on it.

I think one of the clearest signals I’ve felt that AI bullshit has gone too far is its encroachment into pornography. It’s now easier than ever to produce “deepfake” pornography featuring people who have not consented to appear in pornographic material. Of course, AI-generated slop has plenty of telltale signs, still, but the fact this stuff exists at all was already cause for concern even before it was easy to produce it.

On top of that, sites that were once about posting collections of erotic art and animations from artists, movies, anime series and video games are now overflowing with AI-generated swill; a cursory glance at e-hentai’s front page earlier revealed a multitude of galleries tagged with “[AI Generated]”, making them virtually worthless. Of course, e-hentai and sites like it already skirt the borders of morality by often including artwork artists intend to be kept behind Patreon, skeb or Fantia paywalls — but many of these galleries seem to suggest that there are a significant number of individuals out there attempting to position themselves as “artists” when all they are, in fact, doing is plugging prompts into an AI model that doesn’t chastise them in a patronising way when requesting erotic material.

I’m sick of it. I’m sick of Jetpack emailing me to join an AI “webinar”, I’m sick of ClickUp, the productivity tool we use at work, constantly spamming me about some AI feature I don’t care about, I’m sick of the breathless zealotry from the cryptobros who have found the next big thing to latch onto before it all inevitably comes tumbling down in burning wreckage… and I’m sick of the uneasiness that I’m sure anyone in a vaguely creative field is feeling right now.

And I’m not sure it’s going to go away for a while. Big Tech seems determined to make “AI” a thing. And while I’m not averse to actual, helpful uses of it — which I’m yet to see a convincingly working example of that can’t be better fulfilled by other, existing methods — I think we all know that with the people we have in charge, those actual, helpful uses are inevitably going to take a back seat to ways of screwing poor old Joe Public and his friend Struggling Artist out of their hard-earned money more than anything else.

(Aside: I tried running this article through Jetpack’s stupid “AI Assistant” to “get suggestions on how to enhance my post to better engage my audience”, and the thing just crashed. Good show!)

So fuck that bastard little icon. Take your magic sparkles and jam them right up your robotic arse. The only things allowed to sparkle like that are fairies and ponies, and AI is neither of those things. So into the trash it goes, so far as I’m concerned.

#oneaday Day 7: Suggested Content

One of the “innovations” of modern tech and software that I am most consistently baffled by is the concept of “Suggestions”.

Don’t get me wrong, I am under no illusions as to what “Suggested Content” really means on websites and social media platforms (it’s advertising, in case you somehow weren’t savvy enough to know that by now) but I’m talking more in contexts where it’s not obviously advertising, or where it doesn’t make sense for advertising to try and worm its way into places.

Places like, you know, just Microsoft Windows in general. Or Google Drive. Both of those have features where they provide you with a list of “Suggested” files, and I absolutely, genuinely do not understand why that feature is there or what it is for. Right now, for example, my Google Drive “Suggested files” list is a non-chronological index of things that I have opened or edited recently. Fine, you might say, except there is a perfectly good “Recent” option in the sidebar which does give me a chronological list of things I have opened or edited recently.

Likewise, the Windows 11 start menu on my “work” computer (it came preinstalled, otherwise I would have been quite happy continuing with 10 as I do with my “play” computer) appears to “suggest” applications almost completely at random, with its first two suggestions usually being the things I have installed most recently, and the others being… pretty much anything that I have installed, for no discernible reason.

Under certain circumstances, I get the idea. When it comes to media, a “suggestion” feature might inspire you to look at photos or listen to music that you haven’t enjoyed for a while — though this can also backfire somewhat. Earlier today, my phone’s “Gallery” app decided to send me an unasked-for notification that I presume someone somewhere thought was “cute”, with the text “Feline footprints in Southampton”. The attached image? Our dearly departed cat Meg. I’m still quite upset about Meg’s passing, so I emphatically do not want my phone randomly bringing her up out of the blue for no apparent reason. I will look at pictures of her when I’m good and ready, thanks very much.

The push for “AI” in everything is only making this shit worse, too; the Gallery app on my phone recognising that the image in question was a picture of a cat is a result of improving image recognition technology, and I suspect as generative AI becomes more and more pervasive and invasive in our daily online life, situations like this are only going to become more and more common — because you can bet your bippy that all these “Suggestion” features are going to be turned on by default.

What happens when your phone decides to “suggest” a photo of something you’d rather keep private at an exceedingly inappropriate moment? Well, some might say you should keep your private photos private, but realistically, practically speaking, most people these days are not that organised, because we’ve made the mistake of trusting our software and online services to do the organisation for us. I actually like the fact that Google Photos can pick out, say, pictures of cats, or pictures that mention something specific in a piece of text, because that is indisputably useful — but what I don’t want is my phone going “HEY REMEMBER YOUR CAT THAT DIED? HUH? HERE SHE IS, I PICKED HER OUT FROM ALL YOUR PHOTOS, AREN’T I SMART?”

There’s a place for some — some — of the innovations that are currently going on in tech. But, as always, it seems we’re going to have to endure a period of people pushing things to absolute breaking point before we settle into something approaching a useful routine. And, unfortunately, that period appears to have been going on for quite a while now… and people don’t seem to be willing to push back against the more unreasonable uses of these features.

“Suggested Content” can get in the fucking bin. I know what I need on my computer and when. And, more often than not, when I’m browsing the Web, I know what I’m looking for, too. Sadly, it feels increasingly unlikely that I’m going to be left in peace these days.

If anyone mentions Linux, they are getting a slap.