Comment by ithkuil
2 years ago
It's not human, why are you offended by how it talks to you? It's a tool. Many tools need some adjustment before they can be useful for what you do. You surely won't be viscerally upset if you pay $20 for a tool that occasionally spills oil on you if you hold it wrong. You'd still think the tool is crap because its designers made an UX decision you hate, but you surely would not throw away the tool out of principle, right?
It's the same frustration I'd have with other badly designed tools: "I shouldn't have to do this"
I absolutely would refuse to buy tools from a manufacturer that makes user hostile UX decisions on purpose.
That rule seems like it would lock you out of pretty much all modern technology pretty quickly, to be honest. What do you use for daily computer/mobile use? What white goods manufacturers do you go for? A company will make user-hostile decisions the second it knows (or thinks) it can get away with it with a profit - fully featured, long lasting, sensibly built hardware is, sadly, not actually good for business.
First, saying "I would" does not mean I 100% always do. But I absolutely am willing to avoid annoying infuriating companies and products out of principle.
My computer is Linux and most software fully open-source. None of it is user hostile on purpose. I put all the pieces together myself, and if anything is missing I have all the power to change it. For LLM/AI access specifically I am planning to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to efficiently self-host some of the more open ones.
For everything else it's very much a "least bad choice" type deal since you don't have control as a user. Though, it still makes me feel a bit better every time I pay extra for a product that has one less bad feature than the competition. I'm talking about planned obsolescence, user lock-in, "smart" features, and other stuff I try to purposefully avoid.
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It's not precisely user hostility. You're talking about the difference between a hole hog and a DeWalt. ChatGPT is trying to be a DeWalt: It works while also trying to backstop unexpected bad interaction so you don't unexpectedly torque your wrist past its breaking point because you jammed the bit into the wrong piece of wood (to pull the analogy back around: You don't inadvertently get porn or gore or defamatory copy because you asked the wrong query).
Flipping the question on its head, there's going to be a category of user who's asking "Why am I paying 20 bucks a month so this thing can give me answers I can't publish?"