That thing "nobody" was asking for

I watch the occasional Kyle Hill video, and his latest about data centers in space being a bad idea got my attention, so I watched it. Early in the video, he says:

Obviously something is going to have to give if we want to continue to build out this infrastructure that no one actually wants.

Listen, I'm happy to debate the values of AI, and I don't think I'm blinded to their downsides that we need to mitigate. But I constantly see people throw around this general phrase about how "nobody actually wants this" as though it's common knowledge that no one could possibly disagree with. Believe me, Mastodon is my main social network, a day doesn't go by where I don't see someone saying something like this.

But is that actually the case? I opened the App Store on my phone this morning and took a screenshot of the top 8 free apps right now. ChatGPT is number 1 (as it has been for several years in a row), Gemini is number 4, and Claude is number 8. For a thing "nobody wants", people sure are going out of their way to get these apps. And anecdotally, I know a ton of people who aren't "tech bros" who use these tools all the time, even if they do have misgivings about them.

Side note: I see a very common thing where people find AI video and images absolutely cringe, but they find ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude the greatest thing they've ever used. Not just tech folks, regular people. I don't know if this will hold long-term, but it is interesting that AI chatbots and AI "art" are treated very differently by a lot of people (including myself, for what it's worth).

Another way I could interpret this phrasing I hear from people is that people weren't asking specifically for AI chatbots, and therefore it's tech companies giving them something they didn't ask for. If that's the case, then I fundamentally disagree that that's a problem. It's especially rich if it's coming from Apple fans who for decades have complimented Apple for creating products that people didn't even know they wanted until they had them. The only difference this time is that a subset of people don't like these solutions.

So this blog post is genuinely a question. If you're someone who has said that AI chatbots are a thing nobody asks for, what do you mean when you say that? Right now, it feels like a bare assertion meant to shut down debate. Help me understand if I've got it wrong!