So, Microsoft has now made the “focused inbox” the standard in Outlook. It lets AI decide for you which e-mails are relevant and shown directly, and which aren’t, and hidden behind a button (which is too complicated for the employees at my org to find).
Apparently, e-mails sent from the CEO to the entire org aren’t relevant.
I google how to deactivate it.
The entire first page shows AI-written blogs.
On top of the Google page, of course, is an AI summary, which I don’t trust.
So I click through to the source it uses.
It takes me to the Microsoft support forum where someone asked that exact question.
And find out that Microsoft now lets AI answer the questions there.
So when I’m looking for how to deactivate an AI, I get a reply by AI that sources another reply by AI.
If I then say “fuck Google” and wade through the official documentation, Microsoft redirects me to a page that AI-translates it to my language. Replacing the “de-de” string in the url with “en-us” I arrive at the original documentation. Which is of course also written by AI.
I’m sick of it.
They had something similar some years ago (I checked, it was about 10 years, I’m old). I think it was named Clutter. Iirc it moved mails from recipients you tend to delete right away into a separate folder that was very subtle in letting you know that it has new connect.
It was a huge hilarious mess because it moved all notifications people painstakingly set up for themselves to the Clutter folder since people mostly read the notification, acted and deleted it and the “logic” concluded that these mails must be irrelevant then.
For me, it sent the email introducing the existence of the clutter feature to the clutter folder.
There’s really no coming back from that.