Who Else is Sick of All This AI Garbage?

Let’s say you find a new home that’s perfect for you. The right price, the right size, and a beautiful interior sporting your favorite color paint. You’ll take it, right?

So you put down your deposit and wait for the move-in date, only to find “advancements” and “exciting updates” have been made to your once-perfect abode.

The landlord added orange shag carpet to all the ceilings, three doggie doors that open into front street traffic, an outdoor gorilla cage, stairways that lead to nowhere along all walls, and covered the beautiful paint with faux paneling that reminds you of your grandpa’s basement bar.

Oh yeah, and the price quadrupled because of all these “exciting updates” done “to make your life better.” And your deposit is non-refundable. Still happy about your new home?

Of course not. But who cares what you think or need! If more money can be made by bloating the home with useless garbage and jacking up the price, that’s exactly what will happen.

It’s a trend that keeps on growing – much to our disgust and frustration. OK, admit it. More than frustration. Sometimes throw-our-computer-out-the-window rage.

One of the most obvious earlier examples of this trend came with the Obamacare folly. Prior to Obamacare, I recall selecting a longstanding carrier’s health insurance plan that covered what a self-employed freelancer would need – for about $95 per month. [Insert laughter here.]

As the so-called Affordable Care Act came crashing down, any plan from any carrier was instantly unaffordable. The level of insurance that once cost around $95 per month was suddenly something like $950 per month. And that now came with a $10,000 deductible.

Even better, we could no longer pick and choose what we want covered. We could no longer choose to switch plans at any given time. And we couldn’t say to heck with health insurance altogether unless we wanted to pay some ridiculous penalty.

But at least we all get free breast milk pumps!

The same phenomenon is rapidly unfolding in the software industry. But instead of free breast pumps, we’re being blasted with all types of AI tools, features and nonsense that work about as effectively as a garbage disposal stuffed with rocks.

One of my friends recently turned on a video call app she hadn’t used in a while and nearly gave up on the call altogether. The app mercilessly accosted her with so many “new feature” and “try our AI” pop-ups that she couldn’t even find the video screen.

Image editing and layout software has gone off the deep end, with massive buttons in the middle of the screen screaming about their latest AI feature – while the tools you’ve used for years are now merrily buried under pop-up tutorials.

One editing program had become so bloated that it stopped working altogether. When I contacted the company to ask why, they told me it was because my operating system could no longer handle it. Once I bought a new device with X, Y and Z, then their over-bloated software would start work again.

My response to that one? “Screw that. I don’t want all your bloated garbage. It may be time to switch software companies.” Their response? They actually went into my system and finagled it so their software was permanently stuck on the latest version from 2019.

And it still does more than I want or need it to. And I still have the joy of paying their “advanced” higher prices. Switching companies may still be in the cards. But at least what I have and am accustomed to works. For now.

Being able to go back to simpler times may have been the answer for that specific incident, but it’s not one that’s likely to work across the board. Especially when the AI folly is worming its way in to everything from writing a simple social media post to delivering inaccurate – and sometimes laughable – search engine results.

So what do we do instead? Several solutions come to the surface. The first is to address the real reason the AI intrusion makes many of us so dang angry. It’s about more than annoyances popping up everywhere we look.

One aspect is the seeming loss of control, a feeling of powerlessness. The outer world, “powered by AI,” trying to dictate what we want, what we do, and how we go about doing it.

Here comes one of my favorite responses again: “Screw that.” The best way to fight back in such situations is again one of my favorite solutions: surrender. In all honesty, we cannot fight digital “advancements” or the rapid-fire updates that bloat our worlds with more AI garbage.

But we can voice our displeasure to software companies that might actually listen (are there any of those?), switch to software options that refuse to buy-in to the AI fanfare (at least for now), and do our best to focus on the job at hand with the least amount of interaction with AI as possible.

We can also try turning off features and pop-ups that can be turned off, provided finding how to turn them off doesn’t end up taking longer than the entire project we’re working on.

Another good trick is to train our brains to ignore it, the same way we’ve conquered online ads. An estimated 86% of folks have cultivated what’s called “banner blindness,” with the ability to ignore online ads altogether. Nice! There is hope for humanity yet!

Actually, based on the amount of pushback and rage we’re witnessing from many against AI, there is much hope. AI does not control us. It only has the power we give it.

Letting it constantly enrage us is what is giving it its ongoing power. Feel whatever rage is already there. Sit through the pain. Clear it out. Scream, holler, cuss – write a column about it – whatever works for you. Let it go.

Once the emotion is processed, we can start fresh. Learn coping techniques that let us work peacefully while AI spirals off into its own state of idiocy. That is the key to pulling its proverbial plug.

Stop thinking about it. Stop reacting to it. Stop letting it breed all those bees in our bonnets. Instead of viewing it as a threat or something to be conquered, treat it as the nothingness it really is.

It’s just another money-making folly that continues to spin out of control. And if we fell over and died every time we met a money-making folly, we’d all be dead about 6 million times over. Worse yet, we may all be living in homes with orange shag carpet on the ceilings and a useless gorilla cage in the yard.

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Ryn Gargulinski is an award-winning author, artist, speaker and Reiki master who is secretly fond of orange shag carpet. As founder of Sanctuary of the Wild Souls, she helps people trade fear and anger for fulfilment and love. More at WildSS.com and RynskiLife.com.