Once the door is open...
If a friend walks into your house and leaves the door open, you get upset. Doors are meant to temporarily open to let people in, then stay closed the other 99.99% of the time. An open door is an aberration we cannot abide.
But it's not that the door itself is open that irritates us. It's what that state signals is likely to happen next--wind and weather and bugs and animals and any ole person who happens by can just waltz right into your house. Might as well not even have a door. Or walls.
Lately I've been thinking this is why we get frustrated when a service adds even the simplest AI feature. It's not that "AI = bad" or the feature itself is worthless, it's that the creators opened a door and we know all manner of things can slide right in:
- AI spellcheck is now available? Next month AI will just write it for you.
- One-click AI photo fix? Soon your camera roll is full of scenes you never actually photographed.
- Automatic AI summaries? Now it answers questions the article never addressed, confidently wrong.
There are plenty of incentives that cause this to happen (blink blink, shareholders), but more fundamentally, it's part of human nature. If we have a tool we're going to use it wherever we can. Hammers don't just drive nails, and you've probably used a butter knife to do more than spread butter. It's worse in technology where tools with exponentially greater capacity can take over everything. Remember when phones just made calls and weren't replacements for your flashlight, wallet, calculator, and camera?
For businesses building tech products this is magnified even more. Teams will always favor building onto existing structures rather than starting anew. If an AI backend is introduced, it will sit in the corner singing its siren song until it gets used again. And then the song gets louder and more coquettish.
With all the AI hype frothing from tech companies, there's good cause to squint an eye when LLMs drop in. That doesn't mean we should ring alarm bells, boycott AI, or rant on social media, just hold healthy caution and keep our brows furrowed.