alt Hacker NewsThis is the problem with all of the recent “AI” crap that has been shoved into our devices.
We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face.
Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively making a worse UI and often providing little to no benefit.
Most consumers don’t actually care how their tech works, just that it does and gives them benefits.
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I've seen multiple examples of software with good working ML solutions toss them aside for generalized AI with worse results. The real shift here is an attempt at the "one input for everything" user interface without understanding there's extremely few use cases where that's actually the best interface for users.
They've regressed for a long time and there's no signal to consumers that "AI" is anything that "fixes" or brings back what was working.
The example I always give is when google maps got speech recognition, I could ask it "Hey google, what's the E.T.A." and it would magically respond with how long till I arrive. Somewhere along the line it broke and for years now it doesn't work... the last time I tried my phone actually brought up the web browser and did a web search. smh.
The first thing I did when they forced gemini was I went to look how to disable it. Why? It override the old voice I chose to read calender events in the morning... in fact it would start reading like normal, then that stupid gemini voice would cut in and be entirely unhelpful.
its all enshitification.
“AI” is a buzzword now thanks to the Vulture Capitalists.
The feature should speak for itself. If your feature is good you don’t need to market the underlying technology.
Like, nobody gives a shit about settings being stored in an SQLite database. They don’t care how it’s stored at all.
When my friend shows me his new phone and how crazy it is he can zoom so far into the moon you can see individual rocks - he does not give a single shit that it uses AI. He just uses the gd camera.
When you use AI to build a feature, the fact that it uses AI should not be on the tin. What it actually does and how good it is at it should be. Saying something uses AI is pointless. No matter how much the vulture class wants it, fetch is never going to happen.
Uhhh kind of. What you say is definitely true of some products but it's funny, because the EXACT same criticisms were levied against machine learning.
- "ML is such a buzzword. Everyone is trying to shoe-horn it into their product."
- "Why are they putting 'machine learning' in their hero section? Just do the thing well. ML is an implementation detail."
- "You dont even need ML for this. Simple linear regression would be the better choice."
We are so far beyond the pale. This was a valid criticism ~5 years ago and now we remember it as the golden days.
Exactly. It was looking as though Apple understood this. But now they gave in and called it Siri AI.
It’s because they don’t know the actual benefits yet and are all hoping they either accidentally stumble across it/one of us finds the billion dollar application for them.
The real thing i think people forget is that humans actually value time and effort from other humans. AI is often used by people who want to do neither and that's really what it boils down to.
Ask yourself, would you like to receive a christmas or birthday card with a personalized message or something produced you know was 100% produced by AI bot - even better when it has a hallucination in there.