I swear this whole AI thing is getting out of hand. As I have mentioned previously, just as everyone whacked an “I” in front of everything when the internet became the tech darling in the late 90s, so now every man and his dog is branding everything as “AI” capable, or “AI” powered.
The latest I see is from manufacturing giant Samsung, which has released an “AI Powered Cooking Range”.
I kid you not.
And the blurb I read says that Samsung is “betting that features such as a new integrated AI camera that alerts home cooks if a dish is on fire” will impress customers. And of course, it will alert you to the fact on your smartphone.
I do a lot of cooking. In fact, in a past life I was training to be a pastrycook. And I am guessing most people like me know that if you have something on a hotplate, leaving it to its own devices it not the smartest thing you can do. It ranks almost with leaving the child in the car while you pop into the casino for a quick flutter.
And anyway, assuming you are out and you get a message from your S23 saying your house is burning down, there is not a lot you can probably do. I suppose at best you’ll have a nice video of the event to show the insurance company. Maybe they’ll stop laughing long enough to look at it.
I found another kitchen’y one today too from Miso Robotics, and it is called Flippy. It helps in kitchen automation tasks “like frying food”.
Ye gods… we are all doomed.
More serious though, is another story also hitting the airwaves today and it revolves around Adobe apparently allowing the sale of AI generated images (which just means bits and pieces of other images have been nicked and put together like some pixel sized jigsaw pieces). You can apparently buy them through the Adobe Stock system. The catch is these images are purported to be from the Hamas / Israeli war, and media outlets are actually using them as if they were real images in their stories.
Very bad form methinks. And while the images may be artificial, the concept is not that intelligent if you ask me.
I watched Q&A the other night for the first time a long time, and it was a program devoted almost exclusively to AI.
What I found particularly interesting was that while a bunch of people waxed lyrical on the so-called benefits of AI and where it was all going to take us, the one person (as far as I could gather) who actually understood the science of the shit was the one saying “Hang on there. It is not the magic bullet for everything” – as so many seem to think.
The subject of art was also brought up, with one guest panellist insisting that AI generated art was genuine art. This was howled down – and quite rightly too I think – as another panellist refuting this said – and I paraphrase – that ‘art had to also contain some emotion from the artist, no matter its form’.
Anyone who has created, or even aspired to, making a film of any length would agree with that. Not to mention painters, and even architects, in fact anyone who creates.
Maybe I am wrong, but the word “intelligence” means not just that an entity can think logically, which is what most of these AI based devices and systems do, but also have emotion. If not, in my mind they are just assembly line robots with a few billion more lines of code in them, not “intelligent” as such.
Let me know what you think in the comments.