Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash

Once a generation has been raised who never saw a computer that couldn't refuse to let you type what you wanted into it, young people will stop believing that you could ever type what you wanted. Old people will forget that you could ever type what you wanted. It worked with literally everything else.

The execs want AI to show to the investors to improve their job security and compensation packages.

The middle managers want AI to show execs to improve their promotion causes.

The customers only get to talk to the day to day employees of the company, so their opinion doesn’t matter to the rest of the hierarchy

It's a Twitter post, not an English essay that's about to be graded.

At Ignite yesterday they announced that Security Copilot will now be included for free with E5 licensing.

The tool that until yesterday way $50k for a single tenant deployment. Aka, no one bought it, but they need to juice the KPIs so might as well make it free so it looks like someone is actually using it.

But we can't. I can have something styled as a conversation with a token predictor that emits text that, if interpreted as a conversation, will gaslight you constantly, while at best sometimes being accidentally correct (but still requiring double-checking with an actual source).

Yes, I am uninterested in having the gaslighting machine installed into every single UI I see in my life.

This. After a generation of social media sneaking its surveillance, manipulation, and noisy ads into our home, work and mobile lives, it is very obvious that having something "smart" shoved into tools where it wasn't asked for isn't some noble attempt at improving lives.

Users are tired of being continually and transparently abused.

All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.

And suddenly, internal incentives would be to create useful, conflict-free capabilities users actually choose for themselves.

AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap. Sure, people are susceptible to it, and get engaged by it, but it’s not exactly what people want or aspire to.

I want something real, something that makes me feel. AI generated content is by definition fake and not genuine. A human is by definition not putting as much thought and effort into their work when they use AI.

Now someone could put a lot of thought and effort into a project and also use gen AI, but that’s not what’s getting spammed across the internet. AI is low-effort, so of course the pure volume of low effort garbage is going to surpass the volume of high effort quality content.

So it’s basically not possible to like what AI is putting out, generally speaking.

As a productivity enhancer in a small role, sure it’s useful, but that’s not what we’re complaining about.

I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about my Word docs. I just want to write my Word docs.

I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about the quarterly report. I certainly don't want it making up values for the quarterly report. I just want to write the quarterly report.

Having a conversation with a computer is cool. It's a fun party trick. If there were a way to reliably get it to know about all of my things, without the concern that it would then take all that data and feed it to its mothership, I might want to be able to converse with it about those things, under certain circumstances.

But, yes: if I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it. Stop acting like me being upset that it's getting shoved in everywhere is the same as me saying "this is a meaningless achievement."

Oh no, I am definitely unimpressed. That AI you can have a sorta-kinda fluent conversation with is often a complete moron and a habitual liar, and the images it generates are awful - did he not see how horrible that Coke ad looked?

It'll probably end up useful in a bunch of applications soon-ish and I'll probably want to use it eventually, but in the meantime their AI is flooding the internet with absolute garbage, and they are literally shoving AI in my face at every opportunity they get.

It is painfully clear that people just aren't that interested, and they are getting increasingly desperate about finding ways to recoup their massive investments. But people aren't going to magically become enthusiastic about eating rotten garbage if you just keep stuffing it in their mouth!

If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more. But they are in too deep, and admitting defeat and scaling it down until they have an actually good product that people genuinely want means seeing their stock price crater because they will have "lost" the "AI race". Their only option to avoid an immediate collapse is to keep lying through their teeth and keep trying to pretend that it is absolutely amazing and that you just must use it.

Or maybe the CEOs are completely delusional and genuinely believe what they are selling - I'm not sure which one is worse.

If I want MS Windows I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on

If this is not a statement you can make, then Redmond gets to decide what you use, not you

He is deliberately and disingenuously missing the point. It's not that the features aren't good (maybe they are, maybe they aren't). It's about how coercive Microsoft and Windows are with its users, and this exec is failing to address that one.

Just once, I'd like to hear a question get through to these assholes asking them why they are forcing so many unwanted things onto their users. From Microsoft accounts to forced windows updates to Recall... Gone are the days when users had any control over what their computers are running.

But these kinds of questions never seem to get through to them.

Does anyone here know what this arguing tactic is called? It's used by tech leadership all over the world, all the time. Weaponized obtuseness, maybe?

The core of it is that you always have to pretend that everyone is basically on board with what you're doing, just don't blink and pretend that real criticism of your product is simply nonexistent, like a ghost. It's about rolling out a change to existing workflows that no one asked for, getting drowned in a sea of "No, we don't want this, do not change this because of these reasons", and then hosting a Q&A session where you pretend that everyone actually is already in love with the idea, everyone wants it, it's just that a few pesky detractors have minor, easily-addressable concerns like "we don't think it's impressive enough yet (but we're totally on board)" or "what about <pick one of the easiest-to-address technical issues here>?". They must do this consciously, right?

Everything is now either accessing your data directly and you have to opt-out or you can't even opt out at all.

This AI rush/push is also permeating every line and product: from the office suite, to github, to vscode, and even open source tools are getting AI shoved in, like Playwright, and it feels everything else is an afterthought.

It seems Nadya is making a Ballmer-level play. Ballmer had the right intuition: that Microsoft had to move its focus from the desktop to the cloud. But the execution was poor. Now history's repeating.

No. Go away.

  how about a couple of weeks of gratitude for magic intelligence in the sky, and then you can have more toys soon?

  Sam Altman, Sep 12, 2024

Its this shenanigans that forced me to nuke my Windows install and go Arch. I noticed that Windows Defender will upload "suspicious" files and there's no audit trail of what's being uploaded. So I have no way of knowing what personal documents or even proprietary software has gone up to their cloud.

Grown adults spamming the web about this new model from Megacorp X, being all giggly about the new PeLiCaN On A BiCyClE being 0.000017% more realistic than the previous version... get a life

No one gives a shit outside of these nerds, all people want is less work and more free time, they don't give a shit about your generated "art", or how fast this new model solved a problem they didn't know existed 12 seconds ago

Isn't it just the second person? If there were just a Generate button/tab without explicitly addressing me and asking/begging I wouldn't mind it.

I personally also don't have much use for generating images and videos, at least not regularly. I feel like they want us to use AI tools full time, when really we just need to jump in and use them when required, which might be quite infrequently (obviously dependent on circumstance). But who is going to pay the huge cost of having the tools available when you do want them?

So yeah, agreed. Stop making it hard for me to use my tool without accidentally engaging the LLM integration or just flat out forcing it's usage. I don't want that future price hike that comes with LLMs

This is like a chef being confused why people dont like the shoes he made them. Why did he make hungry people shoes? Certainly not to eat?

It's almost as if all the focus has been on eliminating the human... for products designed for humans.

Will there be a moment where people will leave social networks to get “real content” again? Will that be safe from AI optimization then?

Are we seeing the start of the demise of social media?

I can generate images that are difficult to use commercially. I can analyze something with AI but I can't confidently use that output in any setting that matters.

For people who are attempting to engage in profitable work then AI is miserably unimpressive. I don't know what planet this guy is living on. Time is money. Flowery emails and off axis summaries can only create a waste of that time.

That doesn't mean I want it plastered everywhere, in every app or website. That doesn't mean I want to interact with or use my computer via AI, and I especially don't want to talk to my computer to do things. Mouse & keyboard is faster.

But for now at least you can just choose not to use it. The problem is, Microsoft is putting 100% of their efforts into this while long-standing Windows bugs and regressions still exist. They're aware they exist too, and are deliberately choosing not to improve their product.

Windows 11 is already adware. No wonder people are complaining about more ads.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was supposed to be a comically bad vision of the future not a blueprint.

Even just the remind me later option gives me such a horrible vibe. F off Google and respect my choice.

Let's be fair. Microsoft has not succeeded at mainstream consumer AI products... yet.

To say AI failed at Micrsoft when CoPilot (the real one, for developers) was, last I heard, the most subscribed generative AI tool for software developers is not a failure. It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Their other gen-AI components in Office, like Powerpoint and Word, are pretty darn good. But again, unless you're a corporate user in a work setting, you probably don't care.

This push to lease you your own computer is what hasn't worked very well so far. I dearly hope it pushes more people to Linux (though more likely they'll flee to Mac, which is a more palatable version of the clumsy crap MS is trying to do).

So consumer AI... perhaps that has failed. But the money isn't in you and me paying for a Windows license. The money's in big corporations paying for ten thousand seats at a time for their suites.

Nor do I ever want to have a voice conversation with my computer to where it responds in an uncanny valley voice. If I do want to use voice, it's to give a command. No response needed. "Hey computer, call John" that's it. Do the thing, don't talk back. A glorified voice assistant is all the further it needs to go.

Microsoft didn't care to ask users when they put copilot into everything and they won't ask users when they'll "consolidate the experience" to whatever works.

And just so I can claim that I "knew it all along" in the future I'll say that some form of "agent OS" is here to stay when the dust settles.