Have you ever seen the commercials from late 1800s where there is the word “electricity” in everything. Electrotherapy for every ill and electric solution for every type of drudgery, electrolyte drinks and whatnot. Same came with discovery of radioactivity. Radium drinks for long life and all that. AI is the modern buzzword for the modern snakeoil salesman.
'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells
Submitted 18 hours ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world
https://apnews.com/article/ces-worst-show-ai-0ce7fbc5aff68e8ff6d7b8e6fb7b007d
Comments
Korkki@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
I remember a story my Dad told me. His boss comes in and goes “we need a computer” (this was the 80s). He asked “why”. He couldn’t answer.
AI now is like that, except when someone asks “why”, they get fired and the boss slams it in anyway. It doesn’t make the product better or even more attractive. Dell has admitted that and is the only company to admit that. At best it’s a shite search engine that’s being forced on everyone against their will.
AI chat bots should be OPTIONAL, not forced onto people against their will. At best it’s a shitty search engine, at worse it is a slop machine.
Only practical solution I can think of for an AI chatbot is an optional voice mode where you can go to, say, a ticket machine and be all “hey, cheapest fare to Dundee” or something and it gives you it, but that can be done without fucking the environment and eating all the ram by just having better UI design.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
AI chat bots are actually a useful workaround for shitty web uis now. When you don’t know which icon is hiding the thing you want, you can just ask the AI to do it for you.
Horta@discuss.tchncs.de 11 hours ago
Very good comparison actually.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 16 hours ago
And they’ll probably shut down the AI servers in a few years for cost reduction making the whole thing a huge waste of money.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
That’s the point.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
probably shut down the AI servers in a few years for cost reduction making the whole thing a huge waste of money.
It’s like you’ve seen the Portal video chat units. (What a beautiful piece of hardware)
RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
About the Bosch E-Bike, I have a bike with a Bosch motor and they really are that bad. The bike comes with an app and you need to give them your personal data to “unlock” basic features of the app and an electronic bike lock. If you want to let another person use that bike, you need a subscription. I deleted the app. Fuck Bosch.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
Are alternative firmwares available?
jpablo68@infosec.pub 15 hours ago
I refuse to buy “smart devices” riddled with AI, it’s just a drag and not what this tech should be used for.
Mwa@thelemmy.club 13 hours ago
true
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 18 hours ago
I’m just going to install a door knocker.
crank0271@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
The hot new category at CES 2027 is going to be AI-powered auto door knockers.
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 17 hours ago
“It automatically does a facial scan of any household visitors using Palantir’s database and knocks the way they would have.”
“Couldn’t they just, you know, knock?”
“Sure, but then how would we track who’s visiting you while making you pay the power bill for our surveillance devices?”
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Screaming is well and good to build public opinion against this stupidity, but all the CEOs in their towers will heed is no sales.
We need to make it uncool to like or tolerate AI bullshit in consumer products.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
Heckling your friends after they dropped $3k on some sloppy fridge is kinda cruel. Advise them hard when they ask for advice - here’s where you say “everyone will laugh” and “stupidest idea” - but commiserate when they realize what they’ve got.
You want to be in a position to offer advice for the next sloppy purchase.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Could preface it with “are you still in the return period for this thing?”.
PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Hey…ummm, can we be friends?
Disillusionist@piefed.world 13 hours ago
Hilarious. I bite my tongue so often around these kinds of situations it has permanent tooth imprints in it. But you’re right, someone needs to figure out how to get them to stop tolerating this horrific nonsense.
lohky@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I’m holding off until HD AI.
Bluefalcon@discuss.tchncs.de 12 hours ago
3D A.I.
frostysauce@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
AI eXtreme!
We’re going back to the late nineties.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I just installed a new doorbell button, the little light burned out in my old one.
I don’t have a “security” camera. As far as I can tell, all they do is provide a memento of the crime after the fact, and prompt my neighbors to worry about “suspicious” people outside walking. They seem to do the opposite of making people feel more secure. They seem to raise anxiety.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 16 hours ago
Cameras don’t stop anyone, but I still have few recording my yard. It’s more of a hobby and I’m planning to integrate person detection on those to home automation but for me it’s also a small piece of peace on my mind. Should someone steal my car trailer (or a car) I’d have some footage for the police and insurance. Also a while ago we had a decent storm around and we weren’t at home so it was nice that I could check for possible damages remotely.
But absolute majority of time I don’t even think about them. I don’t have any notifications enabled, I’m not interested about neighbors cat running across our yard or getting interruptions every time someone on the family comes or goes. And while Frigate has some AI things built in, the whole thing runs locally. There’s no way I’d install nest or some other camera which sends/stores data to anywhere which isn’t 100% in my control.
YesButActuallyMaybe@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
My dad installed cheap chinese cams all over his place and his job now is to check the footage to see if there is anything suspicious. There’s never anything suspicious and he’s just wasting his time while also getting more paranoid. The biggest issue I see is that he hoards chinesium and bloats his phone with it. It’ infuriating.
Widdershins@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I have a button for a doorbell at my door. Hasn’t worked since I moved in. If I wanted it to work and raise anxiety I would figure out how to make it spray water on whoever is at the door.
zewm@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Mwa@thelemmy.club 13 hours ago
at this point its glorified Market Saturation.
necrobius@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
I’m pretty sure I had a musical lollipop back in the 90s.
Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
floofloof@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
They deserve to sell none of their shitty fridges.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
This is the same Samsung that sold fridges with giant LCD screens on them, ostensibly to help the buyer, but then later turned that expensive screen into a billboard showing ads to the fridge buyer in their kitchen. Samsung has shown who they are. Anyone that buys an AI fridge from them will have no one to blame but themselves.
thejml@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
I feel like the problem here is that you get people who are curious or like the other features the fridge has and just get what they can when theirs goes out. And while, sure, those people learn not to do that again, by that point the industry used that sales data as a “they must like it, lets do it across the board!” Instead of asking people or taking anything else into account when figuring out what products to continue making.
In 10 yrs when those fridges die and people who “learned their lesson” go to buy a new fridge, there will be zero fridges without AI because marketing thought thats why they bought it and no one has any ability to buy a non-AI fridge anymore.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
These also have an entire computer running Tizen behind the screen in the door, which generates waste heat and dumps it… into your refrigerator. Genius!
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
My AI-less fridge is quite private and secure. Furthermore, it keeps food cold perfectly!
Jrockwar@feddit.uk 17 hours ago
It might not be sexy, but I’d argue it doesn’t need AI to be.
Take the SMEG ones as an example - they’re not my cup of tea, but the amount of people who are willing to pay a premium for a fridge that doesn’t do anything special other than looking nice shows clearly that. !image
THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Do they… do they know what the C in CES stands for?
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Nothing now. The branding has completely pivoted, CES isn’t even an acronym anymore.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
cunts
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
Imagesuck it, Jin Yang
darkmarx@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I’ve had a few Samsung appliances. They are, by far, the worst appliances I’ve owned. I will not be buying another from them. If they want to make life more convenient, they need to make better devices, not shove screens, wifi, and AI into their crappy products.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Don’t worry, in the realm of major appliances the majority of what these bozos are calling “AI” actually isn’t. They’re just using it as a buzzword because they think it’s popular.
LG, selling a washing machine two years ago: “It has weight sensors to determine the load size.”
LG, selling the same damn washing machine today: “With exclusive LG® AI DD™ Technology!!!”
(I am not making this up.)
nyan@lemmy.cafe 13 hours ago
Even their older, simpler fridges are crappy. We bought one because our previous fridge conked out in mid-pandemic when the selection of new appliances was low. It lasted about three years before developing an issue that would have cost us more to fix than just replacing the damned thing. So we replaced it with some cheaper probably-Chinese brand I’d never heard of before and will never buy another Samsung appliance again if we can help it. AI will just add expensive, useless functions on top of their already poor design and dubious manufacturing.
In other words, if these become the only fridges in existence, I may just try to find out where I can purchase an old-fashioned icebox.
W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
I have a rule: if the company has ever made a phone or TV I will never buy their appliance.
SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org 9 hours ago
So it's like fashion shows, where they have the most ridiculous shit walking down the catwalk, instead of actual clothes that people will wear?