"useless" is a more positive impression than I have.
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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.
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 ???
Profit potential. Think of AI as one big data collector to sell you shit. It is significantly better at learning things about you than any metadata or cookies ever could.
If you think of this AI push as "trying to make a better product" it will not make much sense. If you think of the AI push as "how do I collect more data on all my users and better directly influence their choices" it makes a lot more sense.
AI is not there to be useful for you. It is there to be useful for them. It is a perfect tool for capturing every last little thought you could have and direct to you perfectly on what they can sell you.
It's basically one big way to sell you shit. I promise we will follow the same path as most tech. It'll be useful for some stuff and in this case it's being heavily forced upon us whether we like it or not. Then it's usefulness will be slowly diminished as it's used more heavily to capitalize on your data, thoughts, writings, code, and learn how to suck every last dollar from you whether you're at work or at home.
It's why DeepSeek spent so little and works better. They literally were just focusing on the tech.
All these billions are not just being spent on hardware or better optimized software. They are being spent on finding the best ways to profit from these AI systems. It's why they're being pushed into everything.
You won't have a choice on whether you want to use it or not. It'll soon by the only way to interact with most systems even if it doesn't make sense.
Mark my words. When Google stops standard search on their home page and it's a fucking AI chat bot by default. We are not far off from that.
It's not meant to be useful for you.
Yes, it seems like no one even read the damn user agreement. AI just adds another level to our surveillance state. Its only there to collect information about you and to figure out the inner workings of its users minds to sell ads. Gemini even listens to your conversations if you have the quick access toggle enabled.
Although I think Steve Jobs was a real piece of shit, his product instincts were often on point, and his message in this video really stuck with me. I think companies shoehorning AI in everything would do well to start with something useful they want to enable and work backwards to the technology as he described here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48j493tfO-o
AI was never meant for the average person but the average person had to be convinced it was for funding.
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
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
Doesn't help that I don't know what this "AI" is supposed to be doing on my phone.
Touch up a few photos on my phone? Ok go ahead, ill turn it off when I want a pure photography experience (or use a DSLR).
Text prediction? Yeah why not.. I mean, is it the little things like that?
So it feels like either these companies dont know how to use "AI" or they dont know how to market it... or more likely they know one way to market it and the marketing department is driving the development. Im sure theres good uses but it seems like they dont want to put in the work and just give us useless ones.
Useless for us, but not for them. They want us to use them like personalised confidante-bots so they can harvest our most intimate data
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.
I side graded from a iPhone 12 to an Xperia as a toy to tinker around with recently and I disabled Gemini on my phone not long after it let me join the beta.
Everything seemed half baked. Not only were the awnsers meh and it felt like an invasion of privacy after reading to user agreement. Gemini can't even play a song on your phone, or get you directions home, what an absolute joke.
Ironically, on my Xperia 1 VI (which I specifically chose as my daily driver because of all the compromises on flagship phones from other brands) I had the only experience where I actually felt like a smartphone feature based on machine learning helped my experience, even though the Sony phones had practically no marketing with the AI buzzwords at all.
Sony actually trained a machine learning model for automatically identifying face and eye location for human and animal subjects in the built-in camera app, in order to be able to keep the face of your subject in focus at all time regardless how they move around. Allegedly it's a very clever solution trained for identifying skeletal position to in turn identify head and eye positions, it works particularly well for when your subject moves around quickly which is where this is especially helpful.
And it works so incredibly well, wayyyyy better than any face tracking I had on any other smartphone or professional camera, it made it so so much easier for me to take photos and videos of my super active kitten and pet mice lol
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.
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.
The first thing I do with a new phone is turn off any kind of assistance.
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.
I’m a software engineer and GitHub Copilot as an AI pair programmer has vastly improved my productivity. Also, I use ChatGPT extensively to help with miscellaneous stuff. Apart from these two, I don’t really find other AI implementations useful.
It's really pointless to most people, it has its use case. But it was just a hype train everyone got on like a few years ago many did with blockchain, another nice technology but only for certain use cases. I don't want nor need an always on AI to search through my phone and spy on me. I have already had overbearing exes try that. It's actually a big reason I am considering switching to a Pixel 10 as my next phone and just installing Graphene OS and calling it a day as my daily driver.
Id take Bixby back over this forced AI crap.
I mean I wouldn't but you know....
I only really use AI shit on my work computer (because hooray I have a Copilot license), and its only marginally better than doing searches myself. Its nice when it works because it lets me save time researching things, but I CONSTANTLY have to ask "are you sure that's real?" because it just fucking makes up random command flags based on the prompt.
And its only marginally better because fucking search engines have their head so far up their ass they can see their tonsils. Godsdammit I want working search engines back.
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.
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
I used it once. Told it to pretend to be a centaur from Mars and explain how centaur sex works. Pretty fucking funny, but yeah it was a one-off.
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.
Generative AI is peaking in it's ability to produce cringe boomer memes from a prompt. Everything else.. MEH.