It is not something that works regardless if we configure or activate it or not. It may broaden the AI use for people that find that useful? Yes. Would that end being dependency on a particular provider? Maybe on how we use it. At some point a lot of those decisions were taken in the past by most of the rest, like using search engines or a narrow/builtin set of browsers or desktop/mobile OSs. If using AIs is a concern then the ship has sailed long ago for many bigger things already.
Your point about censorship, however, I fully agree with.
Also, the base assumption of every prospering society is a population that cares about and values their freedom and rights. If the society drifts towards becoming averse to learning about these virtues ... well, there will be consequences (and yes, we are going this way. For example look at the current state of politics, wealth distribution, and labor rights in the US. People would have been a lot more resentful to this in the 1960s or 70s.)
The same is true about AI systems. If the general public (or at least a good percentage of the researchers) study it well enough, they will force this alignment with true human values. Contrary to this, censorship or less equitable / harder access and later evaluation is really detrimental to this process (more sophisticated and hazardous models will be developed without any feedback from the intellectuals / the society. Then those misaligned models can cause a lot of harm in the hands of a rogue actor).
I don’t know. Weren’t you already running that risk with “download metadata”?
With the whole "no local models?! mega corp censorship!" complaint sidestepped from day 1, and now that it's not even shown on the UI, what will AI opponents complain about?!
I have no interest in any of the AI features that have been added to the UIs of Meta products (WhatsApp, and Messenger), yet still see prompts for them and modified UIs to try and get me to engage with Meta AI.
Same goes with Gemini poking its head into various spots in the UIs of the Google products I use.
There are now UI spots I can accidentally tap/click and get dropped into a chat with an AI in various things I use on a daily basis.
There are also more "calls to action" for AI features, more "hey do you wanna try AI here?" prompts, etc.
It's not just the addition of AI features, it's all the modern, transparent desperation-for-metrics-to-go-up UX bits that come with it.
And yes, some of these things were around before this wave of AI launches, but a- that doesn't make it better, and b- all the AI features are seemingly the same across apps, so now we have bunches of apps all pushing the same "feature" at us.
In this case, Calibre does not seem to introduce any said annoyances (probably because it is FOSS, so no pressure for adoption), but people are upset anyways.
There are many features I don't use in various software, but it never made me complain that a new icon/menu entry appeared.
WhatsApp should release their most searched terms on AI, I bet it would correlate with most common names among WhatsApp users...
Any new feature should face a very simple cost/benefit analysis. The average user currently can’t do that with AI. I think AI in some form is inevitable. But what we see today (hey, here’s a completely free feature we added!) is unsustainable both economically and environmentally.
To develop and sustain these "AI features", human intelligence - manifested as countless hours of work published online and elsewhere - was exigently preempted and used without permission to further increase the asymmetry of knowledge/power between those with political power and those without (mostly vulnerable, marginalized cohorts).
Most devs want to put AI on their CV so they have strong personal incentives to circumvent what is best for their users.
Would you like to have LLM connections to Google from your OSS torrent client?
We can see the painting on the wall, but still not like it.
Having it built-in allows Calibre to add context to the prompt automagically.
Perhaps to the detriment of some compatibility features that got sent to the back burner.
You make LLMs sound like a stalker, or your mom's abusive live-in boyfriend
Not to say that there's no use case (I'd be interested to try a LLM-aided notetaking tool), just that adding a chat box is hardly a feature.
