You seem to be attacking a different statement that no one says: "if the product isn't free, you aren't the product". There's no "if and only if" in the maxim.
Pretty sure you agree that if the product is free, the company is definitely getting value by monetizing something else of yours. It very much is true as written.
You don't think a human using an LLM to generate content that convinces another human to press the launch button is a concern? Sure seems like there's more than one thing we need to do.
> Tend to like a lot of formal rules about everything.
I would amend to: what Americans don't like to accept are what they see as preventable mistakes. The least American sentiment of all is "shit happens". Americans sometimes say that, but they don't mean it. What they really mean: "this shit shouldn't be allowed to happen". Hence the rules, and (in the extreme) the litigiousness.
> there's not really a destination. There is only the process of improvement
Surely you can appreciate that if the next stop on the journey of technology can take over the process of improvement itself that would make it an awfully notable stop? Maybe not "destination", but maybe worth the "endless conversation"?
"Until then" means others will pay for your decision to ignore policy when it happens. It's never on the person who -- with every good intention, full of an instinct to "build a better world" -- willfully ignores the stuffy rules in handbooks and HR guidelines. Instead, when it backfires and someone does threaten to sue, it's precisely execs, HRs, legal who have to deal with it. The rules are there for good reason.
Try to keep in mind that your attention to detail is almost certainly perceived by them to be fastidious, and that quietly your seniormost colleagues and leaders may well muse: "Man, if only sublinear would loosen their standards, just imagine how much faster we'd proceed". Put another way: the fact that you can't relate to OPs problem is because you're hardwired to solve it (putting things in their place) continuously, likely without exception, which means you're paying a different cost. Try to think of _that_ cost when you bristle at their solutions.
This 2021 New Yorker article: How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/how-your-famil...) was incredibly illuminating and changed my perspective on our sense of privacy. With a surprisingly small fraction of the world's population sequenced, we can still match a sample to a person whose sequence we don't have. To quote the article: "Genetic genealogy, it turned out, could function as an all-purpose de-anonymizer".
So perhaps be less upset that Mom signed up; our DNA really isn't ours in the same way the documents on our hard drive. You were never going to be able to opt-out.
OK but then what is the thing in the middle, between documents and applications?
There are fantastic, beautiful interactive experiences (for lack of a better word) that are obviously not documents (they can't be represented on paper, there is code running) but they're not really applications, either (they are fully offline, self-contained, state that's only evident on the page).
This is what I think the future of textbooks and presentations should be. But I think part of the problem is that not only do we not have tools geared toward creating them, we don't even have a name for these things. If we say "document", they flunk the pdf test. If we say "web application", they are lumped into the same lumbering category as office docs and enterprise software.
Maybe Nota is a step in the right direction. But it'd be an even better step if it didn't call itself "21st century documents", if for no other reason than to defend against the valid criticism you levied against it.
It sounds like you already have exactly the right perspective.
It _is_ a nightmare. That $200M isn't their money, it's not in their pockets, and it's far short of what it was hoped to be. You framed it perfectly, and so did they: they're in deep shit, and it's a horror story.
Pretty sure you agree that if the product is free, the company is definitely getting value by monetizing something else of yours. It very much is true as written.