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Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession (www.theregister.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 263 points 8 months ago (67 children)

You know what's free (as in beer and speech) and not being enshittified? Notepad++

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (32 children)

This is not enshittification. Here's where the term came from:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification

In what way is adding an AI assistant to Notepad either "abusing their users" or "abusing their business customers?" It seems like it's just a useful new feature to me, that's still in the "be good to your users" phase.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

AI assistants usually need to upload the data to process it. So it's potential enshitification via adding data upload/harvesting features to a trusted offline text editor. Usually companies have ways to generate revenue streams based on the data from these "free and useful features". Adverts based on what text files you open might be the long term end goal.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you're concerned then don't use the feature. It's really simple.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That would be fine, but a lot of these features are added in an update, with complicated setups or mods to turn them off. Start bar local app search now gets sent to bing search by default, thats almost never what people want. Most people wont know how to disable it or care. But I guess thats fine as long as Microsoft gets to increase its bing usage stats and collect more user data.

To be clear, my problem is with these features getting pushed as default enabled.

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