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Big Tech used AI to take what it wanted. Now consumers are fighting back, too

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Big Tech used AI to take what it wanted. Now consumers are fighting back, too

The first four years of the generative AI revolution have tended to see power flow in one direction. Big Tech firms unleashed their tools on the planet and expected users to like it or lump it. Unhappy with the amount of data collected about you in the pursuit of convenience from your chatbot? Tough luck. Squeamish about the provenance of all the data AI systems have been trained on, and whether it was legally obtained? Not a lot you can do about it.

But as the technology continues to advance, and users become more comfortable with its capabilities, that imbalance is starting to shift. And Big Tech might regret what it’s wrought. If the first few years of the generative AI revolution were about vendor lock-in and AI companies potentially exploiting intellectual property they had no right to use, the next few could see David start to fight back against Goliath.

Like many others, I bought a digital photo frame from Amazon this week, inspired by developer Wes Bos’s reverse engineering of a $50 photo frame he bought from the retailer and turned into a smart display. Within a couple of hours, and with the help of Claude, I’d sidestepped the built-in software designed to lock me into a recurring subscription just to view my own photos, installed an operating system of my choice, and repurposed the frame into a wall-mounted display of regularly updating headlines to keep me on top of the news agenda. I’ve also resuscitated a decade-old printer for which there are no compatible drivers for modern operating systems, and overridden proprietary software for a thermal receipt printer to turn it into an on-demand, tear-off to-do list.


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