I don’t know if you’ve ever used the Vivaldi browser, but take a look at this announcement for their latest update:
We’re launching Vivaldi 7.8 today, and honestly, this one’s different. While every major browser is racing to cram AI assistants into their products, Vivaldi is dropping a middle finger to that entire approach.
Good for them. Dell have realised that users don’t care about AI too. You can read about that here.
Pages used to be a rather nice little word processor that I occasionally used on my iPhone. Apple have just updated it to try and make me take out a subscription to their Creator suite. Two things:
1) I don’t want to use Apple Intelligence when I’m being creative. The pleasure is in the act of creativity, not in the output. You might as well pay someone to have sex for you.
2) Apple say that Pages will continue to have a free tier. No it won’t. Pages was never free, any more than iOS is free. You pay for them as part of the cost of the device. It’s the dishonesty I can’t stand.
If you want to use AI, fine. Personally, I don’t want AI anywhere near my computer. My thoughts are my own, I don’t want my thoughts rewritten by AI. It’s not what the markets want, either. Here’s what Analog says about AI
Statement on the Use of “AI” writing tools such as ChatGPT
We will not consider any submissions written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.
Most other publications say something similar. So if you’re marketing a word processor, don’t pretend that it’s going to help me write saleable stories. It’s quite the opposite.
Finally, it’s getting harder and harder to share these posts. The algorithms on social media sites favour internal content, not external blogs like this. If you’ve been relying on say Facebook to send you to this site then you’ve probably not being seeing many posts recently.
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Tony Ballantyne 