Unpopular opinion: companies continue to shove AI into everything because from their perspective, it's going better than we'd like to admit.

One example is Google's AI overviews. I was one of the people loudly complaining about it in its early days when it was in the news for telling people to put glue on pizza. But the quality has improved gradually yet dramatically, and these days I find it pretty useful.

I think our disdain for companies "shoving AI down our throats" is largely a selection effect — when one of these AI integrations is new and experimental, we tend to notice, but over time the kinks get worked out, it becomes a part of our workflow, and we stop noticing it. Reminds me of the classic quip that "AI is whatever doesn't work yet."

To be clear, even though many of these integrations are pretty useful, the AI-in-everything trend is problematic. There are second-order effects to worry about, such as losing our skills over time when something we used to do manually gets done by AI. And in the case of AI overviews, it cannibalizes traffic to the sources that enable search engines to be profitable.

So if we think these integrations harm us or harm society in the long run, it's not enough to simply yell at companies that we hate these features. They have heard us and have correctly concluded that our behavior speaks louder than our words and that we're not quitting these products over AI features.

I do think there are some AI integrations we should resist, but to do so effectively we first have to get past the simplistic idea that most AI integrations are useless and companies don't know what they're doing.