Part 1: Lane Assist
We recently bought a car, a fancy new car with fancy options like lane assist: a feature that keeps the car in its lane by moving the steering wheel for you. In theory, it is a great feature. In practice, it sometimes fails. Not often, but often enough it will decide it wants to really take an exit, or it will get confused when a road is wide and alternate left and right and left and right, after which I turn it off. For a while. And then I turn it on again.
Part 2: Goodnotes
On a totally different end of the spectrum of software, I am having similar issues. I use an app called Goodnotes, and Goodnotes is my life. I use it all day every day, for making slides, for my todolist (don’t ask me why I don’t use an app for that, I have tried them all and this works for me), and for reading papers. I don’t exaggerate if I say I have been using this tool 10 hours a week for the past decade.
Goodnotes too has implemented AI features, like Universal Object Selection:
Like lane assist, in theory this is pretty amazing. When you are editing and you want to move text or drawing, in the old days, you’d have to switch to lasso tool, select, and go back to pen mode. Now you can just stay in pen mode to move stuff. Similarly, there is the Scribble to Erase.
Very cool and useful, but they occasionally don’t work! If you write a bit hasty, text will be seen as scribble and erased when you write it, and sometimes the scratches don’t register, you will do a few of them and Goodnotes will crash. It is so annoying. I could just use the Lasso and Eraser tool, like I did for years. But I don’t.
Part 3: But I can’t stop!
A sane person would just stop using these stupid features (my husband stopped using Lane assist soon after we got the car, mostly because EU law dictates you have to hold the steering wheel and it warns you of that every 3 seconds with flashes and beeps), but I can’t because, well maybe this time they will work! Like a person in a bad relationship, who keeps going back to an abusive partner, I keep thinking “maybe this time it will be better”.
Soon, all software will implement all sorts of “smart” features, which are AI features, and if people are more like me than like my husband, UX will get a lot worse for most people.
A tool that I have been using for years, whose limitation that I had to switch from pen to eraser to selector never ever irritated me, because that is just how software works, now bugs me all the time, with a bug that is not even a bug, because of course an AI feature can’t work all the time, it is statistics after all. UX has now become a Skinner Box, and who does not like a sip of “OMG this just works” sugar water?
