Rules stop mattering when companies have the wealth of multiple entire nations combined.

AI, for the vast majority of users (and especially in the ways Microslop has pushed it) is completely useless at best and a malicious hindrance at worst. In order for Microslop to even begin to reverse course on their reputation they are going to have to accept the cold hard fact that AI is fetish for shareholders and is not actually what their customers want.

And once they do that then they are basically admitting that AI is overvalued and they overinvested in it and wildly overspent. The fragile house of cards might begin to wobble and the bubble might even pop, so naturally every tech company refuses to acknowledge the pushback against AI outside of rare cases of “We’ll revaluate our approach” like Windows did recently. They’re going to have to sink a lot lower before they’ll even consider budging on major changes to their business strategies.

They’re a private company and thus have resisted many of the enshittification trends that run rampant through the industry.

And also their competitors are absolutely atrocious and are completely tone-deaf to what customers actually want.

I’m glad there are official studies being done to document this, but also it’s vary obvious if you’ve spent any time around people in the past few years. The degradation of critical thinking and research skills is highly tangible and disturbing. Any country that isn’t addressing this significant intelligence gap is going to have an entire generation (or more) of brain-drained, unskilled citizens that can’t meaningfully contribute to the national workforce. For western countries that have already surrendered most of their manufacturing and innovation overseas, this will be even more devastating.