The desperate forced adoption of "AI" seems more like rape than marketing.
I disabled Gemini. But unfortunately they tied a whole host of features I really liked about my phone to that fucking thing. And now they're all unusable. Google has effectively made themselves useless to me. There is now literally no point in having Android over any other OS that exists.
Good news for you, iOS' Siri will now be Gemini
The majority of people's issue with AI is that it's an unhelpful level of competence. It's obviously advanced enough that it isn't just a basic automation tool while at the same time being stupid enough that you would never trust its output. This puts it in an awkward cultural point where it's use is effectively nullified by its own incapabilities.
Essentially I spend about as much time fact checking it as it would if I just done the task myself.
I swear we were told when all this started the AI was going to bring about a cultural revolution give us Star Trek replicators and warp drive.
AI is like a 5 year old that can write perfect english, is really good at arguing his point but totally lacks self reflection skills and likes to make up stuff.
Tbf 5 years could really argue their point if you just believe they are not 5. Something about having infinite confidence.
LLMs are just knowledge replicators. There are multiple Star Trek episodes that feature this kind of technology without any actuall intelligence but incredibly good at replicating preexisting knowledge and experiences.
Like the Drone that Picard encountered where he lived an entire life in a civilisation that had died long ago. Or basically all Holodeck Episodes.
Still actual intelligence with creative thought is something somehow different.
I can not for the life of me figure out a single problem or need I have in my life where the solution is "more technology".
I could not care less. I'm at zero Kelvin for technology. Nothing's moving, there's no interaction, I do not care.
But what about shareholders?
Big woop. Over the last year or so, it moved from "can reliably set a timer" to having to yell at it, multiple times, crossing an unexpected amount of hurdles, to get it to maybe understand that you want to set a timer, and god forbids that you want it with a specific name and duration. Oh, and the icing on the cake : it worked perfectly when it was locally running on the phone, and started going downhill when they pulled the plug on that.
I wonder why people aren't sold on such wonderful tech.
With Gemini Intelligence, Google plans to take Gemini’s agentic capabilities to the next level, where it can also handle complex tasks, such as finding the most suitable guided tours that fit your specific requirements.
Why would anyone do that ?
Seems its just an answer still searching for a question.
I never wanted AI on my phone, period. I don't care which one. The Google Assistant was more than enough, if not too much. Never got asked if I wanted any of this shit, it was just forcefully added into every fucking thing.
My old ass phone, Google pushed out AI. (I plan to swap to GrapheneOS soon). It's less useful than Assistant. And features are disappearing.
My Windows 10 PC... fucking AI added. To be honest, never opened it.
Because I use Android Auto when driving, technically, thanks to Google, I have AI there too. And as stated, it's less functional than the original assistant.
Drive-thru... AI. It's slower and less accurate than a person. Only upside, because it doesn't have a budget mic from the 1980's it's clearer than a person.
Work... AI. Co-Pilot for VSCode, as a tool, it's fine, get's a lot wrong. But I had some upper manager claim they recreated DoorDash in like 5 minutes with AI (clearly they didn't). We just had a recent wave of layoffs (I survived). But they are monitoring AI usage to ensure we use enough per month...
News?... AI. Both good or bad news about it, I'm just so fucking sick of the exact same things. Trump, AI, Trump, AI, Trump, AI... that's all it is, all the time. Just how both are fucking everyone.
About 30% of my interactions with Google assistant were me asking for a joke, 20% ended in frustration that it didn't accomplish whatever task I hoped to do hands-free, 40% getting pissed at it responding to "okay" when it wasn't supposed to and 10% that it didn't respond when I wanted it to.
Eventually I turned off the voice activation entirely, and my number of interactions since has sharply decreased.
Now I'm throwing it out entirely.
But they are monitoring AI usage to ensure we use enough per month...
Tokenmaxxing for the win
I had some upper manager claim they recreated DoorDash in like 5 minutes with AI
lol k
Not sold is putting it very mildly. I found a fix for all of the bullshit though: you go into the default apps area and you choose none for assistant. Before I did that they had sideloaded fucking Gemini onto my phone via Android Auto and when I was trying to navigate somewhere I had to speak to some useless middle manager Gemini guy that didn't like cursing before he passed it off to the virtual woman to do the actual navigation. Google: bringing the patriarchy to your digital assistants.
Again, add this to the 'no shit' bag
It's not Intelligent. I call it Artificial Incompetence.
I have Actual Intelligence and Google has Anti Intelligence in their stuff now.
Lmk when AI can clean my house and do my dishes.
Then i might be interested, maybe.
I'd rather sit and play guitar while AI does the dishes than do dishes while AI generates music.
I totally agree with you, but that problem is way harder to solve than LLMs and music generation.
We got LLMs and music/image generators first because there's so much written information, music recordings, and images to train models on. There's practically zero data about how your body moves when you're washing dishes and what it looks like in the sink, what a dirty plate looks like or a clean one, so we can't just train robots to do it yet except in extremely specified environments with as few variables as possible.
There's a lot of advancement in this area, trying to solve these problems. Robotics is a very exciting field of advancement these days. Automated dish cleaning machines exist that don't use AI, but they're industrial and expensive. If you want something that uses dawn, a sponge, elbow grease, and your particular style and height and form factor of kitchen sink, we need a lot of data about people washing dishes to train models on.
At least, at this point we do. We will probably get to a point where an AI enabled robot can learn new manual tasks, but think about how long it took YOU, a human, to develop and learn motor function and coordination. All that motor telemetry data, input sounds, sights, and tactile sensations are handled by your brain silently, and we take it all for granted. But it's all built off a lifetime of your brain taking input data and processing it so you can run the biomechanical series of squishy meat levers and pulleys to wash the dishes.
LLMs and music generation.
I'll head this off at the start: The comparison is already extremely skewed. There's no hard "right" or "wrong" with creating text or images. Fuck up a sentence? Eh, whatever. Miss a note? Call it Jazz. Extra finger? ...okay, maybe there is a "wrong" but it's not a costly mistake.
Generate a dish-cleaning procedure that ends up trying to place down the cup where it is typically placed down, except the randomly deviating space is now partially occupied by a plate also placed within typical deviation of where plates typically are? Cup tips, falls, crashes and now the floor has irregularities not accounted for in the original procedure generation. Do I abort, try to generate a new procedure or carry out a floor-cleaning routine? How do I identify which option to go for, assuming I detect the irregularities at all?
The pattern-generation/-imitation approach used in GenAI is ill-equipped for systems requiring strict conditions and semantic requirements attached to parts of the pattern, for the same reason we've had incidents of agentic GenAI breaking production systems and their general tendency to produce shitty code that needs human supervision: There is no meaning to the tokens. That's good and well when you can kimit permissions and double-check before applying their suggested changes, but it works poorly with physical tasks.
Which is why
Automated dish cleaning machines exist that don't use AI, but they're industrial and expensive
They're the physical equivalent of specialist systems, built for a specific task and very good at it, better than humans even. I would hope they'll become more affordable at smaller scales, but I think the current hype about universal systems isn't gonna deliver the results we're hoping for. Humans are sorta good at many things, but I think imitating them shouldn't be aiming for imitating sorta good utility.
I'd love to see the development of human-like machines be treated and funded as a fancy toy, maybe a platform to explore the nature of sentience and sapience, a vehicle for science. I don't need them to have practical applications any more than I need other research to start out with a practical application: maybe an actual use will emerge down the line, maybe the lessons learned will contribute to other research, who knows. Just let the nerds go wild with the nerdery and keep business out of it.
The universal household robot would probably be a natural language interface for a dispatching system instructing and coordinating specialists. And if manually placing my dishes in a receptacle or sorting my laundry is all I have to do, I'll be happy.
Oh or finally drives a car! I was promised that 10 years ago.
With sick Pam Bondi on the White House's new advisory council on AI, Android users are right to avoid Gemini.
True! Messaging. Forgot about it. I'll add.
I had my first real encounter with Gemini while using Android Auto. In my experience, it's a great improvement over Google Assistant. GA couldn't tell me what the temperature was a year ago on this day. Gemini handles this and complex questions easily.
I don't want it and as soon as I found out how to disable it, I did so
gee, i wonder why...
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