This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
A 100% accurate AI would be useful. A 99.999% accurate AI is in fact useless, because of the damage that one miss might do.
It's like the French say: Add one drop of wine in a barrel of sewage and you get sewage. Add one drop of sewage in a barrel of wine and you get sewage.
I think it largely depends on what kind of AI we're talking about. iOS has had models that let you extract subjects from images for a while now, and that's pretty nifty. Affinity Photo recently got the same feature. Noise cancellation can also be quite useful.
As for LLMs? Fuck off, honestly. My company apparently pays for MS CoPilot, something I only discovered when the garbage popped up the other day. I wrote a few random sentences for it to fix, and the only thing it managed to consistently do was screw the entire text up. Maybe it doesn't handle Swedish? I don't know.
One of the examples I sent to a friend is as follows, but in Swedish;
Microsoft CoPilot is an incredibly poor product. It has a tendency to make up entirely new, nonsensical words, as well as completely mangle the grammar. I really don't understand why we pay for this. It's very disappointing.
And CoPilot was like "yeah, let me fix this for you!"
Microsoft CoPilot is a comedy show without a manuscript. It makes up new nonsense words as though were a word-juggler on circus, and the grammar becomes mang like a bulldzer over a lawn. Why do we pay for this? It is buy a ticket to a show where actosorgets their lines. Entredibly disappointing.
Most AIs struggle with languages other than English, unfortunately, I hate how it reinforces the "defaultness" of English
99.999% accurate would be pretty useful. Theres plenty of misinformation without AI. Nothing and nobody will be perfect.
Trouble is they range from 0-95% accurate depending on the topic and given context while being very confident when they’re wrong.
We're not talking about an AI running a nuclear reactor, this article is about AI assistants on a personal phone. 0.001% failure rates for apps on your phone isn't that insane, and generally the only consequence of those failures would be you need to try a slightly different query. Tools like Alexa or Siri mishear user commands probably more than 0.001% of the time, and yet those tools have absolutely caught on for a significant amount of people.
The issue is that the failure rate of AI is high enough that you have to vet the outputs which typically requires about as much work as doing whatever you wanted the AI to do yourself, and using AI for creative things like art or videos is a fun novelty, but isn't something that you're doing regularly and so your phone trying to promote apps that you only want to use once in a blue moon is annoying. If AI were actually so useful you could query it with anything and 99.999% of the time get back exactly what you wanted, AI would absolutely become much more useful.
AI is useless and I block it anyway I can.
"Stop trying to make ~~fetch~~ AI happen. It's not going to happen."
AI is worse that adding no value, it is an actual detriment.
Ai is a waste of time for me; I don't want it on my phone , I don't want it on my computer and I block it every time I have the chance. But I might be old fashioned in that I don't like algorithms recommending anything to me either. I never cared what the all seeing machine has to say.
"PLEASE use our hilariously power inefficient wrongness machine."
I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that it’s useless.
I don't think it's meant to be useful....for us, that is. Just another tool to control and brainwash people. I already see a segment of the population trust corporate AI as an authority figure in their lives. Now imagine kids growing up with AI and never knowing a world without. People who have memories of times before the internet is a good way to relate/empathize, at least I think so.
How could it not be this way? Algorithms trained people. They're trained to be fed info from the rich and never seek anything out on their own. I'm not really sure if the corps did it on purpose or not, at least at first. Just money pursuit until powerful realizations were made. I look at the declining quality of Google/Youtube search results. As if they're discouraging seeking out information on your own. Subtly pushing the path of least resistance back to the algorithm or now perhaps a potentially much more sinister "AI" LLM chatbot. Or I'm fucking crazy, you tell me.
Like, we say dead internet. Except...nothing is actually stopping us from ditching corporate internet websites and just go back to smaller privately owned or donation run forums.
Big part of why I'm happy to be here on the newfangled fediverse, even if it hasn't exploded in popularity at least it has like-minded people, or you wouldn't be here.
Check out debate boards. Full of morons using ChatGPT to speak for them and they'll both openly admit it and get mad at you for calling it dehumanizing and disrespectful.
/tinfoil hat
Edit to add more old man yells at clouds(ervers) detail, apologies. Kinda chewing through these complex ideas on the fly.
nothing is actually stopping us from ditching corporate internet websites and just go back to smaller privately owned or donation run forums.
I didn't even realize until you said this that I already do that lol
A damning result for AI pump and dump scammers.
every NVDA earnings call lol. Old man Jenson had a (chip) farm, AI AI OH! guy literally said AI almost 100 times in a call.
Unless it can be a legit personal assistant, I’m not actually interested. Companies hyped AI way too much.
"useless" is a more positive impression than I have.
The AI thing I'd really like is an on-device classifier that decides with reasonably high reliability whether I would want my phone to interrupt me with a given notification or not. I already don't allow useless notifications, but a message from a friend might be a question about something urgent, or a cat picture.
What I don't want is:
It seems like those are the main AI features bundled on phones now, and I have no use for any of them.
That's useful AI that doesn't take billions of dollars to train, though. (it's also a great idea and I'd be down for it)
You mean paying money to people to actually program. In fair exchange for their labor and expertise, instead of stealing it from the internet? What are you, a socialist?
/s
AI was never meant for the average person but the average person had to be convinced it was for funding.
Nothing bores me more than their events that focus on AI.
I do not need it, and I hate how it's constantly forced upon me.
Current AI feels like the Metaverse. There's no demand for it or need for it, yet they're trying their damndest to shove it into anything and everything like it's a new miracle answer to every problem that doesn't exist yet.
And all I see it doing is making things worse. People use it to write essays in school; that just makes them dumber because they don't have to show they understand the topic they're writing. And considering AI doesn't exactly have a flawless record when it comes to accuracy, relying on it for anything is just not a good idea currently.
As an android user (Pixel), I've only ever opened AI by accident. My work PC is a mac and it force-reenables apple intelligence after every update. I dutifully go into settings and disable that shit. While summarizing things is something AI can be good at, I generally want to actually read the detail of work communications since, as a software engineer, detail is a teeeny bit important.
Not sure if Google Lens counts as AI, but Circle to Search is a cool feature. And on Samsung specifically there is Smart Select that I occasionally use for text extraction, but I suppose it is just OCR.
From Galaxy AI branded features I have tested only Drawing assist which is an image generator. Fooled around for 5 minutes and have not touched it again. I am using Samsung keyboard and I know it has some kind of text generator thing, but have not even bothered myself to try it.
Certainly counts, Samsung has a few features like grabbing text from images that I found useful.
My problem with them is its all online stuff and I'd like that sort of thing to be processed on device but thats just me.
I think folks often are thinking AI is only the crappy image generation or chat bots they get shoved to. AI is used in a lot of different things, only difference is that those implementations like drawing assist or that text grabbing feature are actually useful and are well done.
Not sure if Google Lens counts as AI, but Circle to Search is a cool feature.
Not to the point where it's worth having a button for it permanently taking up space at the bottom of the screen.
On a lot of phones you can hide the navigation pill, but Samsung started forcibly showing it when they added Circle to Search. Fortunately I don't have a Samsung phone.
only corporations ever pushed it, customers do not want it or need it.
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.
The first thing I do with a new phone is turn off any kind of assistance.
It actually gets in my way every time it does something so that I have stop what I'm doing to kill it. Would love to be able to uninstall it
Do I use Gen AI extensively?…
No but, do I find it useful?…..
Also no.
Ai sucks and is a waste of humanity’s resources. I hate how everything goes on buzzwords industry trends. This shit needs to stop and just focus on simplicity and reliability. We need to stop trying to sell new things every cycle
I'm shocked, I tell you. Absolutely shocked. And if you believe that, I got some oceanfront property in Arizona. I'll sell you too.
My kids school just did a survey and part of it included questions about teaching technology with a big focus on the use of AI. My response was "No" full stop. They need to learn how to do traditional research first so that they can spot check the error ridden results generated by AI. Damn it school, get off the bandwagon.
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.
Not only that, but Google assistant is getting consistently less reliable. Like half the time now I ask it a question and it just does an image search or something or completely misunderstands me in some other manner. They deserted working, decent tech for unreliable, unwanted tech because ???
Id take Bixby back over this forced AI crap.
I mean I wouldn't but you know....
Anyone who has been paying attention has been waiting for this enormous bag of shit to explode already.
AI SLOP!
I don’t see how AI can benefit my phone experience.
I use my phone to make phone calls and for text messaging. Where does AI fit in? It doesn’t.
Tbf most people have no clue how to use it nor even understand what "AI" even is.
I just taught my mom how to use circle to search and it's a real game changer for her. She can quickly lookup on-screen items (like plants shes reading about) from an image and the on-screen translation is incredible.
Also circle to search gets around link and text copy blocking giving you back the same freedoms you had on a PC.
Personally I'd never go back to a phone without circle to search - its so under-rated and a giant shift in smartphone capabilities.
Its very likely that we'll have full live screen reading assistants in the near future which can perform circle to search like functions and even visual modifications live. It's easy to dismiss this as a gimmick but there's a lot of incredible potential here especially for casual and older users.
I planned to skip this generation, assuming this would be the year of useless ai cramming, even though my phone was getting old. Samsung was so desperate to sell s25s upgrading was essentially less than staying with my current model. Bought it, and turned all that mess off
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.
Honestly I can't say I've ever had a reason to use it on my phone.
