Technology

A damning result for AI pump and dump scammers.

Sometimes I wonder what is going to happen to all this tech in 4 or so years when its less profitable to keep the AI centers on.

Right now they are "free" because of all the investment that is going on. But they have a huge maintenance/energy cost.

On Samsung they got rid of a perfectly good screenshot tool and replaced it with one that has AI, it's slower, clunky, and not as good, I just want them to revert it. If I wanted AI I'd download an app.

Anyone who has been paying attention has been waiting for this enormous bag of shit to explode already.

Just look at Smart Speakers. Basically the early AI at home. People just used them to set timers and ask about the weather. Even though it was capable of much more. Google and others were unable to monetize them for this reason and have mostly given up. (Protip: if you have a google speaker and kids, ask about the animal of the day. It's an addition during COVID times for kids learning at home.)

But people also aren't used to AI yet. Most will still google for something, some already skip that step and have ChatGPT search and summarize. I would not be surprised if the internet of the future is just plain text files for the AI agents to scrape.

I love the AI features for photos of my galaxy, but other than that I don't use it

The first thing I do with a new phone is turn off any kind of assistance.

Surprise surprise!

At work we deal with valuable information and we gotta be careful what to ask. Probably we'll have a total ban on these things at work.

At home we don't give a fuck what your AI does. I just wanna relax and do nothing for as long as I can. So off load your AI onto a local system that doesn't talk to your server and then we'll talk.

It's possible that people don't realize what is AI and what is an AI marketing speak out there nowadays.

For a fully automated Her-like experience, or Ironman style Jarvis? That would be rad. But we have not really close to that at all. It sort of exists with LLM chat, but the implementation on phones is not even close to being there.

Honestly I can't say I've ever had a reason to use it on my phone.

AI SLOP!

AI is useless for most people because it does not solve any problems for day to day people. The most common use is to make their emails sound less angry and frustrated.

AI is useful for tech people, makes reading documentation or learning anything new a million times better. And when the AI does get something wrong, you'll know eventually because what you learned from the AI won't work in real life, which is part of the normal learning process anyways.

It is great as a custom tutor, but other than that it really doesn't make anything of substance by itself.

Personally, I am just not going to use the smallest screen I own to do most of the tasks they are pushing AI for. They can keep making them bigger and it’s still just going to be a phone first. If this is what they want then why can’t I just have the Watch and an iPad?

maybe if it was able to do anything useful (like tell me where specific settings that I can't remember the name of but know what they do are on my phone) people would consider them slightly helpful. But instead of making targeted models that know device specific information the companies insist on making generic models that do almost nothing well.

If the model was properly integrated into the assistant AND the assistant properly integrated into the phone AND the assistant had competent scripting abilities (looking at you Google, filth that broke scripts relying on recursion) then it would probably be helpful for smart home management by being able to correctly answer "are there lights on in rooms I'm not?" and respond with something like "yes, there are 3 lights on. Do you want me to turn them off". But it seems that the companies want their products to fail. Heck if the assistant could even do a simple on device task like "take a one minute video and send it to friend A" or "strobe the flashlight at 70 BPM" or "does epubfile_on_device mention the cheeto in office" or even just know how itis being ran (Gemini when ran from the Google assistant doesn't).

edit: I suppose it might be useful to waste someone else's time.

I use chatgpt for things like debugging error codes but I have to be explicit with as much detail as possible or it will give me all sorts of inapplicable crap

Artificial Incompetence

The only thing I want AI (on my phone) to do is limit my notifications and make calendar events for me. I don't want to ask questions. I don't want to start conversations.

I want to open my phone and have 1 summary notification of things I received and things to do. I want the spammy ones to just be auto filtered because I never click on them.

I'd also love if I could choose when to manage all of these notifications with my AI assistant. The only back and forth I'd like is around scheduling if I need to make changes.

I found AI tools awesome for removing objects in photos or transcribing a conversation. Other than that it's useless because it's not reliable.

I like the idea of generating emojis with Ai on phones. All other use cases that apple has presented seem useless to me. I was really hoping it would be something, anything, but it was just underwhelming. And then apple didnt even have it ready for the iphone 16 at launch but said the phone was built for apple intelligence..? Seems kinda rushed and half baked to me. I also like using copilot is vscode. Its proven to be pretty good at helping me debug

The only Galaxy AI feature I find even a bit amusing is Portrait Studio, which can turn a photo of someone into an AI generated comic or 3D picture. But only as long as it remains free, it's not something worth paying for.

Can it generate weird porn locally?

Count me in!

I don’t use the A.I. features on iOS or Android — I have both for developer reasons — but I do like the new Siri animation better than the old one. So, not a total waste of time and money. More of a 99.999% waste of time and money.

Maybe it’s useful for people who work in marketing or whatever. Like you write some copy and you ask it to rewrite it in different tones and send them all to your client to see what vibe they want. But I already include the exact right amount of condescension expected in an email from a developer.

I hate it 🤷 I keep it turned off anywhere that I can.

I need AI summaries a lot less than I would prefer a smart mail filter to actually remove all the spam email and texts.

The only AI thing I use on my Fold is the photo cropping, definitely nifty to just pull out a subject, it's not perfect ofc but way easier then manually trying to cut it out lol.