Do I use Gen AI extensively?…
No but, do I find it useful?…..
Also no.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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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.
Am I crazy? I’ve got this thing writing code and listing website listings. I ask it certain things before Google and just have it give me the source. I use it to sum up huge documents to quickly analyze them before I go through them. Feels like how Google felt I when it first came out. Yall using the same ai?
(Apple ai is not what I’m talking about)
Students are currently one of the major benefactors of LLMs lol.
"PLEASE use our hilariously power inefficient wrongness machine."
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.
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.
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.
Well, that's depressing. Where's my Star Trek future?
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 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.
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.
only corporations ever pushed it, customers do not want it or need it.
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.
I want a voice assistant that can set timers for me and search the internet maybe play music from an app I select. I only ever use it when I am cooking something and don't have my hands free to do those things.
Id take Bixby back over this forced AI crap.
I mean I wouldn't but you know....
Bixby is the 8th or 9th best kitchen timer I've ever accidentally bought.
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.
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
Yeah? Well I fucking love it on my iPhone. It's summaries have been amazing, almost prescient. No, Siri hasn't turned my phone into a Holodeck yet but I'm okay with that.
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
We do, I just wish it was all of us globally.
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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.
But imagine!!! What if AI could write your text messages for you and convincingly hold phone calls??? Then you wouldn't have to use your phone to interact with human beings at all!!!
~Why does anyone want this?~
Nothing bores me more than their events that focus on AI.
It's all just to get more data from you so it can monetized.
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.
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.
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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:
- Ways to make fake photographs
- Summaries of messages I could just skim the old fashioned way
- Easier access to LLM chatbots
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
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.
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.
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