Fortunately, the iTerm feature is not mandatory, nor are they now sponsored by OpenAI or neglecting other "duties" (it's a free and open-source project) as far as I can tell.
iTerm has always been an "everything and the kitchen sink" type of project/software. If you want minimalism, especially in the interest of security, it's definitely not the terminal emulator for you – its attack surface must be massive.
Yeah, I'm not one of the people mad at iTerm right now, I'm simply saying those people aren't absolutely deranged and there are good reasons to balk at the inclusion of AI features where they don't need to exist.
Looking at the issue tracker, they're abusive bullies acting like they own the project though. They could've nicely instead of balking and stick to facts instead of making wild claims about bait and switch spyware. Their behavior is anything but normal.
If you think AI is bad, wait til you hear about humans...
Im being facetious, but my point is that raw power/data usage isn't by itself a bad thing, as long as it is providing commensurate value. Now you can argue thy don't do that yet, but that would require a lt more nuance than "using resources bad".
I don't think "AI bad" but I think some of the people saying "AI bad" have interesting reasons for saying so.
For the record I believe a lot of the "AI Bad" discourse is a direct carryover from "NFT/Crypto Bad" discourse. A lot of the annoying voices that were loudly promoting NFTs and dodgy web3 companies two years ago are now LOUDLY promoting dodgy AI companies...
Some of it still rings true, a lot of it seems like "twitter is still mad"
The parallels even extend further: A lot of the people (largely correctly!) crying "scam" back then for crypto are now crying scam for AI.
If I had to draw a historical analogy, it'd be to the dot com bubble: Yes, it was a bubble – yet the Internet turns out to have been real. It just was almost impossible to guess correctly as to which company would still be around after the bubble burst (to say nothing of the now-giants that didn't even exist back then).
But that kind of bubble is very different from crypto, which so far has yet to prove that there was any substance to it, despite having gone through at least one global hype cycle and bubble burst two years ago. I don't recall there being two years of frantic search of an application for the web/Internet back in the early 2000s.
Just wait until the enshittification hits. The power and compute to train and run AI models aren't free and all of these products integrating AI are going to get... interesting when the AI companies start trying to get to profitability.
The proxy server was not created through petabyte-scale plagiarism.
A proxy server does not use half a million kilowatt hours of electricity a day.
This is nothing like complaining that Firefox allows you to enable a proxy server.
I use ChatGPT but I also think the AI detractors have some good points...