It’s been a year and a half and it seems like 10 have passed. In May 2024, Microsoft announced the launching Windows Recallan artificial intelligence option that allowed us to remember and recover things we had done on our PC.
It seemed like an interesting idea, but soon he was criticized his approach to privacy and security and the company had to delay it and then relaunch it without making too much noise. That was one of those AI features that promised to transform our PC experience, but three years after the launch of ChatGPT, one thing is certain:
AI has not meant no revolution.
Not at least on the PC, we insist. Microsoft, of course, has not stopped adding more and more AI functions to Windows 11. We have co-pilots and theoretically revolutionary functions to bore, and that obsession with putting AI even in the soup has been demonstrated with the legendary Notepadwhich has gone from being a minimalist app to one that is losing focus.
Microsoft’s reasons are legitimate: they have invested a real fortune in AI and they will want to take advantage of it. Surely the intention was good (at least, in part) when it came to offering new ways of working and enjoying our PC.
The problem is that good intentions have caused just the opposite of what Microsoft intended. Instead of us wanting to use Windows 11 more and more, is making us want to use it less and less. We have seen it with renewed interest for some Linux distributionsbut also with the appearance of an app that is exclusively dedicated to eradicating Windows 11 any trace of AI functions.
AI fatigue
The same thing is happening with AI browsers. Comet, Day and Atlas They are two striking proposals for this integration of AI functions, but neither of them seems to have caught on, and Microsoft Edge – which of course has integrated Copilot – has not proposed any change in trend either: the browsers we want to use, at least for the moment, continue to be the traditional ones, without AI.
And there is the key. In what We users have not asked for so much AI.
That is precisely the great criticism of these industry efforts to boast that their products have AI. Those two magic letters no longer get expectations. What they are starting to get is rejection.
Firefox is the latest example. Mozilla has just appointed a new CEO, and in its first public statement it pointed out its intention to transform Firefox into a product in which AI was the central axis. The users of this browser – and I count myself among them – are not at all clear, and the unified response message has been clear: “Firefox does not need AI, but rather listen to its users“.
What has happened and is happening with Windows 11 and Firefox shows that we are entering a new stage in which AI no longer excites, but rather fatigues. It’s everywhere:
The list is of course much longer, and in many cases there is another added problem: that AI is the excuse to raise prices. Microsoft is here again a notable example with Microsoft 365but we have also seen it in Adobe, which He raised the price to his customers right off the bat because now they could enjoy an AI that they had not asked for.
It’s happening everywhere because the promised AI revolution still hasn’t happened. There are, of course, areas in which it has proven to be transformative—programming is the clear case—but in many others that acronym has lost its meaning.
The industry’s commitment to making this work is logical: companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars invested with the idea that this was going to explode… and so far it hasn’t.
But they continue to fill everything with AI. And as often happens, that’s the bad thing.
It tires you a lot…And if we haven’t asked for it, even more so.
In Xataka | Adobe has presented itself as the champion of copyright in the AI era. Now we know that maybe not so much
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings