A friend of mine from engineering school had pretty much this exact idea for a joke record player: Require the user to provide a record and place the needle on it, but then use image-recognition to identify the label/cover art and stream the album while the record spun uselessly.

Seeing someone do this, but unironically and for a real product specifically meant for humans who are actively developing their sense of how the world around the works, feels somewhere between cynical and outright deceptive. It reminds me of the Mechanical Turk (the original one, not the Amazon service): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk - a machine deliberately designed to mislead.