Technology

Correct. It's about metrics. They're making AI opt-out because they desparately need to pump user engagement numbers, even if those numbers don't mean anything.

It's all for the shareholders. Big tech has been, for a while now, chasing a new avenue for meteoric growth, because that's what investors have come to expect. So they went all in on AI, to the tune of billions upon billions, and came crashing, hard, into the reality that consumers don't need it and enterprise can't use it;

Transformer models have two fatal flaws; the hallucination problem - to which there is still no solution - makes them unsuitable for enterprise applications, and their cost per operation make them unaffordable for retail customer applications (ie, a chatbot that gives you synonyms while you write is the sort of thing people will happily use, but won't pay $40 a month for).

So now the C-suites are standing over the edge of the burning trash fire they pushed all that money into, knowing that at any moment their shareholders are going to wake up and shove them into it too. They've got to come up with some kind of proof that this investment is paying off. They can't find that proof in sales, because no one is buying, so instead they're going to use "engagement"; shove AI into everything, to the point where people basically wind up using it by accident, then use those metrics to claim that everyone loves it. And then pray to God that one of those two fatal flaws will be solved in time to make their investments pay off in the long run.