What did anyone expect? I think this is literally the central purpose of this: to make sure the population is less well-informed so they can be ruled more easily.

I really used to think self-declared western liberal democracies were better than this. I don’t anymore.

What now?

With free software, I can just modify my client to tell any backend that I’m over 18 or over 21 or whatever the highest age bracket is. The backend is, as I understand, supposed to then take that claim at face value and deliver to me the version that is intended for adults.

There are many problems with the entire thing, but this one in particular is a non-issue.

oddly enough all these things have repeatedly appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in my lifetime, e.g. titlebars on Windows became transparent with Vista, then stopped being so in, I think, Windows 8?

Plenty.

I think as long as there is competent human verification of what it’s done, it’s legitimate to use AI for nearly anything. Especially the creation of art.

But I’ve also read that AI has been helpful in finding security problems in software that humans likely wouldn’t have found. I don’t see a reason to hate AI in general.

I would start here: https://ryf.fsf.org/products?category=1&vendor=All&sort_by=created&sort_order=DESC or if that is too limiting, here: https://kde.org/hardware/

Nowhere close to the >95% market share IE had in the early 2000s.