Lately on yt I have been seeing a shitload of ads for a new oven with AI, it is marketed as knowing what you are cooking in it would make it better.

I don't see how.

Also, on the product page on the manufacturers web page, the second sentence of the body reads:

Navigating through the extensive settings menu is beautifully simple with the new touch screen user interface.

I am sorry, a fucking settings menu on an oven is a primary sales argument?

What the hell?

There is more shit:

With cookControl Pro, all you have to do is select your dish, choose how you want it done, and let your oven do the rest.

You mean like a normal oven? You set the temp according to the dish?.

They even brags about internal steak and bread thermometers, we have had those for decades.

Well obviously, it has a connection to an app or even a smart speaker, and ofcourse the UI on the oven is a touch UI.

Thanks, but no thanks, I'll keep using my oven with normal knobs....

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[–] 31 points 1 week ago

Navigating through the extensive settings menu is beautifully simple with the new touch screen user interface.

I am sorry, a fucking settings menu on an oven is a primary sales argument?

Lol fuck that. A touchscreen certainly isn't a selling feature on a device I expect to be reliable. And why would I want a menu of options for a device that normally offers all its settings up-front?

They even brags about internal steak and bread thermometers, we have had those for decades.

And they either break after a few uses or they just don't read the temperature properly and cause the oven to set the temperature incorrectly.

Well obviously, it has a connection to an app or even a smart speaker, and ofcourse the UI on the oven is a touch UI.

If it doesn't work without a network connection I don't want it. An appliance should be dead-simple, standalone, with near-bulletproof electronics and no built-in process decisions that are not clearly surfaced to the user.

Thanks, but no thanks, I'll keep using my oven with normal knobs....

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 week ago

    it's so they know what to advertise to you

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  • [–] 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

    It's probably not using any AI in any modern sense of the word, it's just there for marketing purposes. What I'm guessing it really is, is more fancy sensors (temperature sensors in more locations, infrared sensors, moisture sensors), and multiple heating elements and/or fans that can be individually turned on and off, connected to a more complicated PID controller that is adjusted based on the selected dish. So it can do things like detect that the rear is hotter than the front and turn off the rear heating element, or detect if too much moisture is being released and turn down the temperature, but it's ultimately the same kind of technology as any oven with a temperature knob uses.

    I rarely use my oven for anything other than pizza, bread and cookies, so it's probably not very useful to me, but maybe it's convenient if you do things like cooking a whole turkey or something?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I don't have a link but there was a great video about an "AI rice cooker" and then a breakdown of the quite simple fuzzy logic actually inside

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I can see a few uses for a smart oven like that, for lazy cooking by inexperienced chefs.

    For example different meats require different cooking temperatures. If the computer knows that it's cooking beef and that you want it medium rare, then it should be able to calculate from the shape + weight + evolution of outside temperatures when the inside of the beef is at the right temperature. With a normal oven you'd have to guesstimate the time yourself (hard without experience) for when you should start probing the meat with a meat thermometer.

    The added value for an experienced chef is probably nil. They know when the meat is ready by look and feel and they might probe it once to confirm that they were right.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago*

    I think a lazy person would just toss it in a crock pot before going to bed/work and an inexperienced person would probably want to learn.

    Fast food restaurants would probably want them though. But it's not as easy to make a quick buck in that market as it is in the consumer appliance fad market.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Why does an oven need to connect to an app for the clock to be set?

    Ask Samsung

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  • [–] 13 points 1 week ago
    [–] 11 points 1 week ago

    It needs to know so it can send your data to whatever company made it, duh. Nothing will go wrong giving ai control over something that can start a fire in your house.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago

    The manufacturers' reasoning here is presumably that the more technology is built into a device, the faster it becomes obsolete, and the sooner consumers will have to buy new devices.

    This is a classic example of consumer-unfriendly design, in which manufacturers ensure that devices have a limited useful life or a purposely frail design. This is called planned obsolescence and can be achieved through both mechanical means and software.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago

    The touchscreen is cheaper to install than buttons and knobs, and they're trying to come up with reasons that a cheaper, worse product is actually good and you should thank them for their innovation.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Ill bet there is a subscription for all those "features" that bricks it if you dont pay them monthly after buying it for $5k

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago

    At least with the internal thermometer you could plausibly use some kind of control loop. But all the recipes you get are going to assume a normal fixed-temperature oven anyway.

    I think all the "AI" magic beyond that is a con, in the purest sense of the word. They are trying to get people's money by building unearned confidence with bullshit.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago

    Obviously it doesn't. Same way a fridge doesn't need to know what you have in it.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    An oven should turn on, hold temperature, and that's. That's all it needs. Might be nice if it can also do convection stuff. And super high temperatures for pizza. But it doesn't need to know if I'm baking bread, destroying evidence, or making pizza bagels.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago* (2 children)

    My air fryer (just a small countertop convection oven big enough for a whole chicken and sides) has a meat probe attachment that turns off the device when the internal temp reaches the desired doneness, and that requires telling it what kind of meat you have, but thats all. It doesnt need to know anything else, including whether or not you have sides, that’s what the guide tables in the booklet are for.

    I assume this ai thing just does the same thing internally, and probably doesn't even have ai or advanced logic at all. You plug in the food and it references the guide table itself internally. Saving you exactly zero time because plugging in the food is more work than looking at a reference table.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Someone cooking a whole chicken and sides in a single air fryer at the same time is exactly the type of dumbass I'd expect to be using AI and AI bullshit products. 🤡

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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Why? Its a small countertop convection oven thats branded as an air fryer. You dont know what you are on about if you think thats anything new or special. Every oven I've ever had including when I was a baby was convection, its just been shrunk and rebranded as air fryer. This one has about the same interior space as a large microwave and fits about the same space as my microwave. Its not like one of those shitty plastic things or something.

    I use it to avoid using a gas oven. It was $200 when i bought it, and I was careful to make sure it would do what I wanted it for.

    https://www.sharkninja.com/ninja-prestige-smart-xl-air-fryer-countertop-oven/DT501.html

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago
    [–] 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    The AI companies are investing into AI startups, and then showing all the sales as "proof" to investors that they're viable so they can get infusions of cash.

    When bubble bursts it will either devistate the world, or force us to rapidly switch to an entirely planned economy.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    I dunno when this Brazilian microwave oven I have was manufactured, but it's very old by now. While it doesn't have any "smart" features (let alone "AI"), it does have dedicated buttons for specific dishes (beef, chicken, fish, veggies, rice, etc). Some meals require different patterns of cooking (e.g. full blast for few minutes, followed by low intensity for the remaining time in order for the dish not to end up burnt). The more options of dishes available, the more this functionality becomes part of the sales pitch.

    So, it's far from a novelty, and to be fair, having the oven/microwave/etc to "know" the dish could lead to more precise cooking... But it doesn't need to ship with a spying operating system with internet connection, ads, telemetry, terms and conditions, software updates and a "you're absolutely right, I mistook your margherita pizza for a frozen lamb and it ended up burnt. Do you want to learn more about the nutritional benefits of burnt pizzas, the Italian culture of pineapple-covered Bruciato, or do you want to stick a cheese to it using the surely-nontoxic 3M® Scotch SuperGlue? Let me know if you want to proceed with the US$ 2999.99 purchase (half soccer ball equivalent weight of pineapple and a pack of three SuperGlue) from our 1,048,576 partners using your MasterCard ending with 9999 and CVV number 909".

    !fuck_ai@lemmy.world

    Photo of an old microwave oven I have, manufactured by a Brazilian company.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    I've seen new ones with TVs to stream what's inside. In some way that is neat, but, really, you really suck at cooking if you can't learn to manage an oven. It's better and safer to just learn.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    The AI is a gimmick. It's probably not actually ai. But I can understand tweaking the timing and temperature of certain dishes for optimal juiciness and texture. Some people will cook eggs on high and they come out bad other than some people cook them on a lower temperature for a longer time. Now imagine that someone did science experiments on a bunch of dishes and just programmed it into a basic chip. I think the biggest part would be having it validated and verified. But calling it AI obviously means you did not do any of that so.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (7 children)

    I remember in Star Trek Voyager, Capt Janeway is a terrible cook when she's using a replicator. I thought that it was absurd that someone of her age couldn't cook. Now, I imagine products like this are the cause of that.

    80 years ago most people knew how to butcher and clean their food.

    60 years ago people knew how to cook a roast to perfection.

    40 years ago people could cook an entire dinner in a microwave.

    20 years ago people could have entire dinners frozen and prepared delivered to their door.

    today, people couldn't tell you what kind of cut of meat they're being served, or how it was cooked, or what the ingredients are. but, they can tell you all the marketing bullshit on the box it was delivered in.

    ok, so the years aren't 100% spot on, but you get the point. as we become more dependent on technology, we lose more abilities to care for ourselves.

    ask someone, "how do you start a fire?" I'm willing yo bet their answer depends on technology invented in the last 100 years.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    80 years ago most people knew how to butcher and clean their food.

    I know lots of country people still get enjoyment out of killing things. Not sure if they eat what they kill, or just cut the heads off to glue on the wall. But I assume some kill and clean.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    I learned how to field dress a deer in highschool.

    we learned each cut of meat and how best to cook it.

    we learned how to balance checkbooks, file our taxes, and even an introduction to how to read law.

    my school was small, rural, and underfunded.

    if they could do it, all schools can do it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (4 children)

    They can't do that, it would convince too many people to stop eating meat.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    Not really. It's free protein, as long as you don't rupture the gut.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    It's not free, you have to kill an innocent creature and mutilate its corpse. I've done it before. It's not a nice experience.

    For some people, that isn't a big deal. For most people, killing and mutilating animals is actually really traumatic.

    And if everyone had to go through that experience, a lot more people would decide to just stop eating meat entirely.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    I thought that title was like a metaphor or proverb. Now I just wish it was.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago

    Ads? On youtube? What is this, 2015?

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