The microtransactions are one issue among many. To be frank, putting microtransactions in a $70 USD title would still warrant negative reviews in and of itself, but the the game is also having catastrophic performance issues and crashing on PC for what seems to be the majority of players, to the point of many Youtube channels covering it that did not get press copies being all but unable to play at all.

It doesn’t matter if a game has a lot of good elements, if it has bad ones and people cite those bad elements in negative reviews it’s not review bombing, it’s consumers giving an honest review of a product.

There is a massive fundamental difference between having a person see your face in public, or even having a basic security camera record your face, and having a system recognize your biometric data and stalk you through every public environment with extreme precision.

The general public should absolutely not accept the imposition of being expected to be followed through every public place by private corporate entities for undisclosed purposes. We can and should aggressively push government representatives to take strong regulatory action to outlaw this behavior and aggressively punish violations.

Will making these efforts actually change matters? Maybe, maybe not. Will throwing your hands up and just assuming it’s impossible to change anything and that we should all just lay down and accept it as fact lead to the worst possible outcome? Absolutely.

LLM powered search is so great, if it can’t find the information you’re looking for it will just make up random bullshit for you! And all it costs is Microsoft looming over your shoulder to datamine and sell everything you ever do!

This is something I think a lot of people don’t get about all the current ML hype. Even if you disregard all the other huge ethics issues surrounding sourcing training data, what does anybody think is going to happen if you take the modern web, a huge sea of extremist social media posts, SEO optimized scams and malware, and just general data toxic waste, and then train a model on it without rigorously pushing it away from being deranged? There’s a reason all the current AI chatbots have had countless hours of human moderation adjustment to make them remotely acceptable to deploy publicly, and even then there are plenty of infamous examples of them running off the rails and saying deranged things.

Talking about an “uncensored” LLM basically just comes down to saying you’d like the unfiltered experience of a robot that will casually regurgitate all the worst parts of the internet at you, so unless you’re actively trying to produce a model to do illegal or unethical things I don’t quite see the point of contention or what “censorship” could actually mean in this context.