"AI-powered" has become a red flag | Hacker News Reader

"AI-powered" has become a red flag

iml.bearblog.dev

78 pointsIlasky39 comments

> that's what your "AI-powered" marketing signals to me now: "We added AI to cash-in on the wave and stopped giving a shit to what users actually wanted".

Hit the nail on the head here. That's the message I get from such marketing as well.

Actually we have leads / customers asking us in Request for Proposals, what AI we have in our products [Because competition has it]. We know the competition doesn't have that, they call their smart alerting features when a certain threshold is met "AI-powered".

AI became a marketing tool, and customers grade you on it.

During an electric car expo where my former employer showcased their battery-powered EV chargers, bypassers asked several times if we used AI to control the batteries.

I think “AI” is indistinguishable from “computer programming” for the general public.

Your “if/else” block is another person’s AI.

You can spot an electronic brain from miles away by the number of LEDs blinking in chaotic synchronicity.

My IT dept wants me to buy this crazy over priced 360deg webcam for meetings that focuses the on person speaking using "ai"(you know, instead of picking up which mic is getting the higher volume).

Edit: I'm guessing this req didn't come from IT, but from some c-suite.

What do you mean by crazy overpriced? Quality webcams usually cost around 300, which might look expensive to an uninformed - but it's a fair price for the product you get. The lens they're using is just more expensive which you can easily see if you look at the resulting video

I.e.

* Opal C1 (as good as it gets wrt picture quality, no 360) ( https://opalcamera.com/opal-c1 )

* Insta360 ( https://www.insta360.com/product/insta360-link ). Pretty sure this products "AI" marketing predates the current AI craze. They were using regular vision detection from what I recall (which has been a thing long before LLMs). And all the other features work very well too (noise cancelling microphone, gesture control etc).

Probably the owl cam for >$1000

Ding we have a winner. Quite a bit more than that if I remember correctly.

That's not classic webcam though and it's definitely not overpriced if it works as advertised.

Getting a 360° video feed that's automatically cropped to 4k into the correct direction while keeping the audio feed stable from multiple microphones etc...

these kinds of conference room solutions often go into the range of multiple thousand.

If it works as advertised at least. It probably doesn't, but I've got no experience with that company. I just can't see them creating a good 360° feed wile outputting quality 4k video cropped to the person speaking in that budget. You'd realistically need multiple of the lenses like the opus C1 as fishlens wouldn't allow you to keep the 4k Output looking good enough.

I'd have expected a device at least 4x the size with a price of 10k at minimum for the features they're advertising

Internet during the dotcom. Everything was built on the internet. Think pets.com. Blockchain has gone through this a number of times. Kodak renaming to include blockchain in its name. Now its AIs turn.

Two of the founders of my company are old school AIers (80s MIT and CMU/Stanford; PARC etc). When an investor asks us if we use “AI” we now say, “oh not at all, just some machine learning”. And it’s not core to the product, just some safety systems.

Topmost applications where the badge would actually get my attention:

- anything biological

- music

- packet crafting

- risk management

- anything regulated

- robot behavior

Curious if a badge for “def not AI powered” would be a plus for some domains.

Lots of people in artistic/creative domains are basically "AI vegan" these days - a "definitely not AI powered, definitely not powering AI" badge would be a minimum requirement there.

Cara went from 100k users to 650k users in a week. It turns out that people who do creative work like to use software that caters to them and don't like software that steals their labor. Who knew?

(not creative myself)

Looks like Cara is a consequence of Meta’s AI diet. I’ve seen the Adobe license —- it appears you can’t opt-out of helping “improve” their software with your content. Do we assume Adobe is too big to route around?

What is Cara? Searching yields too many results, including a Cara.ai

After searching for a bit and finding a post on reddit, I think they mean https://cara.app/

Cara is an art portfolio site run by artists and volunteers

There's an open source alternative to every single piece of software Adobe offers.

> Curious if a badge for “def not AI powered” would be a plus for some domains.

LinkedIn posts come to mind. Definitely also food. Art.

paleofuture.com has that.

Well than, may I present you with what might be the very first Rock opera made with AI

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH64e88v_3mMjcuEvOixg...

Why does AI for risk management get your attention?

I love to hear pitches on a company product and just blurt out "Where is the AI?" or "What's your AI strategy?" just so they can take it back to their teams and spend loads of $$$ developing some useless AI feature no one really wants.

I call this technique Roadmap derailing.

There's some things I'd love an AI powered service for - for example no one has really gotten AI powered email right yet. But I use and love a few "AI" services too. Kagi's on a good path with summarization of results and quick answers - I use that AI service everyday. Claude is pretty darn good at inventing recipes from a list of ingredients and appliances that I have available. But to be fair to the blogger, I don't care that it uses LLMs - I just like that it solves a problem for me.

AI summaries are an absolute disaster for the web. It's often inaccurate, it relies on stolen content, and it puts search engine operators in the position of content publishers which is right in the crosshair of laws like section 240. Complete nonsense.

Independent of section 240 or other laws, I would argue that search engine operators are content publishers as soon as we don't know how they choose the order of the results. Same for social media feeds.

Curating is a form of publishing, and following an algorithm is not curating per se, but, if that algorithm is non-transparent, and unknown to the user, it is the same end result...

I agree that systems that are virtually public utilities at this point should be operated more transparently. Google can put whole swaths of legitimate businesses out of business with minor tweaks of the algorithm. We complain about SEO but how do we know Google is optimized for search quality vs their own financial gain?

The same hype cycle as with anything else, as noted in the article. I too am wary of the badge - what's your actual product doing man?

Remember when everything was on the blockchain?

I saw a Google ad for "AI-based" reverse recipe search (list what food items you have, find makeable recipes.) That was a thing 15 years ago.

A Google search does that well enough for me on its own

I figured there'd be a healthy "AI client" market with basic controls, ability to get advanced and use eg JSON templates/tools, and no code multi-step workflows

Instead seems people went with thin layers on incumbent or thin wrapper on ChatGPT.

May the next year be more interesting

People who are tooling up definitely want a 1/4" drill bit.

Their client wants the shelf.

The shelf wants the 1/4" hole.

The installer wants the hole to be precise and clean and the only way they know of obtaining that is a 1/4" drill bit. Their last one broke and so they want one.

I mean it depends on the customer. If you’re selling to a homeowner, then yeah a bit that lasts a few dozen uses and is approximately 1/4” is fine. For a handyman, the requirements are different. Do you need to sell homeowners a bulletproof drill bit? Do they need or want that?

"the visuals are also so overdone — if I see one more gradient-colored button with or emojis for the "AI-enhancement" or whatever, I'll just make a plugin to block that CSS altogether"

Gradients... so hot right now.

Yeah, it's now in EVERY producthunt title. So fatiguing. I wonder when saying "AI-powered" will = saying "computer-powered" and we can just drop it.

  - Your in-house AI video marketing agency
  - AI powered zero-waste meal planner
  - Turn your document databases into AI powered libraries
  - LLM powered intelligent knowledge interface
  - Build AI powered SaaS apps and internal tools with no code
  - AI tool for stunning product photos

Just wait what Apple will showcase that intelligence

With AI models getting better every year, this article will age quite badly.

Yes, there are inaccuracies and hallucinations, but it can still be made to benefit many applications.

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