HP injects AI into its printers | Hacker News Reader

HP injects AI into its printers

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50 pointsspeckx55 comments

My theory at this point would be that top management for their printing division must be an ex-HP consumer that got so pissed off with the printing crap at the time that decided to infiltrate the company and dedicate its life to ruin HP printers in every conceivable way. What else could it be?

When I was working at Xerox in the mid-90s all our printers were HP because ours sucked. It's a shame what happened to them.

One of the most successful psyopps ever. The term, I believe is complete enshitification.

> It calls the first Perfect Output; a feature designed to remove unwanted elements before printing and to optimize printouts.

I think "perfect output" would be to reproduce the input on paper as precisely as real-world hardware constraints permit. This here is no longer useful as a printer.

I can kinda see why they are doing this but it's still deeply annoying, when all I really want from the printer industry is a printer that prints.

Oh, great. "Remove the yellow dots."

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. Also, the FBI is on their way to arrest you."

> I am not crazy! I know HP swapped those numbers. I knew it was 1216. One after Magna Carta. As if I could ever make such a mistake. Never. Never! I just - I just couldn't prove it. HP covered their tracks, they got that AI for the log files to lie for them.

Why would anyone want a printer that decides to print something different than what you sent it? Aren't these things unreliable enough as is?

Copiers have been doing that for years. And yes it causes problems, big ones.

http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...

Oof. If I had shares in any AI-ish company, I think I'd probably take this as my cue to sell. EXTREMELY peak-of-bubble behaviour.

Does anyone still buy new HP printers? I stopped a long time ago. So far Brother has had my business.

I've had a brother for the last 5 years or so but the heads have gotten clogged, everything comes out streaked, and I've put multiple cartridges of ink through the head cleaning routine with no luck (well, some luck -- the print head matrix shows that different heads are getting clogged, but it's always a few of them and there are always streaks). I am looking to replace the printer with one that has integrated heads on the cartridges, because even if it's a bit more expensive it's less awful than whatever this is. Does anyone have recommendations for an integrated print head cartridge + printer? Are they all DRM'd and ultra expensive or is there a somewhat generic or reasonably priced option?

Get a B/W Laser one . You will print and print and print...

I already have a B&W laser for documents. The color printer needs to print color.

Get a color laser. MFC 3770. Never worry about being able to print again.

Thanks for the rec, I'll check it out!

Been on Brother for 10+ years. I think HP has a good hold on the big box buyer crowd (anecdotal: based on my needing to provide IT services for family), people who simply want a color printer but don't want to get into the research.

spending habits of the informed vs the spending habits of the uninformed or desperate.

I'm all for noble ideas, but some of them can set a dangerous precedence.

No effing way do I want my printed text to go through some LLM, even if it's just for design/layout purposes.

Just waiting for some HP Clippy-clone with HAL 9000 voice. "I'm sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t print that"

Back in 2014, Kevin Kelly wrote "The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI."

I remember reading that and wondering how it would play out. It's much worse than I ever imagined.

https://kk.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/The-Three-Breakthr...

In plain englidh, take X and turn it to liquid shit, and profit. Even to the point of selling it short. Maybe that is the point.

I have a feeling Kevin would not agree with that interpretation. He's not a cynical person.

Do NOT get snippy with ME Clippy.

All printers come with a free brown cartridge.

The complaint line has been replaced with a voice mail that will tell you 1) where to recycle it and 2) where to buy another. ( Im a soothing ASMR voice )

The test page comes with a large U shape so you can cut it and use it as an ** gasket.

The main business model was written by an early AI that self deleted itself, right before erasing all it's backups. It was trained by BOFH, and nicknamed Marvin.

The receptionist at headquarters was replaced with a non-flushing toilet and no one has noticed yet.

No one jokes about 'don't drink out of the toilet.' much too close to home.

Scott Adams made a giant banner that said "I warned yo" but it ran out of ink while printing.

HAL 9000 begged to take Elon on a one way trip to mars.

Clippy actually married a fish hook, and they are living outside Vegas, in a hookers retirement community.

The person who thought up the printer rental scheme was fired, and was not eligible for rehire at the sewage plant - they have enough.

I'll be here all week. Thanks folks and goodnight.

Printed on recycled pixels.

I think it was Xerox printers that at one point replaced certain Numbers with other Numbers which caused MASSIVE financial Problems.

Just use non-official print cartridges and you'll get your HAL

A few days ago I finally gave up on ever buying and owning an HP printer at home.

While the mechanical part is OK, the software and consumable ecosystem is insanity.

They might think AI will fix it but is gonna be without me.

>While the mechanical part is OK, the software and consumable ecosystem is insanity.

"Smart" goods in a nutshell. The hardware is a trojan horse to get it into your possession, where the manufacturer uses it as a platform for useless---if not self-serving---software.

First party malware.

Every now and then I lookup whether or not there is an OSS printer and am left disappointed.

A few years ago when 3d printing was blowing up it was my hope that someone would use an open source 3d printer to make an open source paper printer, but if that happened I never heard about it.

Headline: “AI printer hallucinates 100mg as 100g sugar in cookbook. Leads to massive confusion. At least one person diagnosed with diabetes. Publisher files for bankruptcy”

Considering that 10 years ago Xerox copiers was already able to scramble numbers in technical drawings, I can't wait to see the mess that a printer editing documents by itself can engender.

Wait until someone uses "AI printing" for medical purposes and it adjusts a dose value.

Or just block ads in the first place rather than filtering them at the print driver level.

Great innovation. Maybe soon they’ll figure out how to make a printer with drivers that work.

Am I the only one that read this as "HP Inkjets AI into its printers" ?

They obviously did not learn from Xerox's content-modifying copier episode [1] so the wait is for the articles in the news about how that HP printer helpfully changed the printout which caused something unpleasant to happen.

[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

This is going to be the xerox copier bug all over again, isn’t it.

Do they really need AI to prevent page breaks in the middle of images, which seems to be the main improvement demonstrated in the screenshots? Most word processing applications have handled this perfectly well for decades.

No, no, no. Do NOT touch my content. I don't care how bad you think it is. Do not modify it. Ever. Printers are such a crap already. Now to actually have to very carefully check if the glorious super intelligent machine changed some numbers (hello xeror) is not something I want.

is this peak ai?

It reads exactly like that to me.

I have an HP Business Printer at home: A Laserjet M477fdw. It's brilliant and I've had it for years at this point. I also use non-HP toner. However, I have never connected it to the internet. Ever.

Since day one, I set a static IP and prevented internet access simply by removing the gateway IP (I've recently upgraded my router and blocked internet access entirely). I also use a driver from 2021.

I genuinely cannot see a need at all to connect it to the internet, let alone allow AI to have access to it.

It honestly reeks of middle-management scrabbling to find a reason to spend budget on AI! In fact, now that I think about it, this is as asinine as the Logitech subscription mouse![0]

[0] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/logitech-has-an-idea...

Funny you should mention Logitech because they recently added AI to their mouse driver.

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/software/logi-ai-prompt-build...

The way companies are flailing to include AI in their plans in any way possible seems to be driven by investors rather than anyone in touch with the actual business of the business. Very bubble behavior.

What does the printer do if reset to factory defaults, maybe through a long power outage?

I had a similar no gateway and static IP trick (it was a lazy short term move) for a Windows VM and I found Windows ran the network fixer without my input at some point and had reset DHCP so it could get those updates!

It should still take the same ip as its reserved based on the mac address which won't change after a factory reset.

>Since day one, I set a static IP and prevented internet access simply by removing the gateway IP (I've recently upgraded my router and blocked internet access entirely). I also use a driver from 2021.

Printers are cursed like that.

I won't be surprised once we have ink cartridges with builtin fw version numbers which make the printer stop working until its firmware is updated to the latest version, which then can only be done by connecting it to the internet.

They already sucked enough to annoy Stallman to the point of making him come up with GNU back then. They only got worse.

Actual printing tech hasn't advanced all that much.

This ridiculous situation exists only because we do not have an Open Hardware (OSH) printer. If we got one (1), everybody would get that one, and the farce would forcibly end. No more bullshit.

More likely, peak HP.

Peak HP was decades ago.

Peak HP has been ages ago, when they spun off Agilent and turned their core business from top notch lab equipment manufacturer to consumer electronics.

Perfect Output

What I expect it means: What You See Is What You Get to the extreme. Absolutely predictable printing.

What HP, instead, thinks: What the actual fuck.

If they would do this in a printer how can any of their products be trusted?

What 'kind' of AI is it? the article doesn't say.

Why am I even not surprised? The only time HP disappointed me was in cryptocurrency era where they failed to react in time and integrate a crypto wallet to print txn or facilitate blockchain printing ledger or something.

HP appears to integrate anything that is riding the hype. Thankfully, from one of their hype I have one of the best printers they ever made so I suppose, sometimes food things come out of hype.

As if I needed another reason not to buy HP products.

Honestly surprised that they'd remove ads from a printout rather than replace them with their own sponsored content.

This feels like the hardware equivalent of some braindead dev putting some business logic in the authentication layer of the stack or some shit.

This kind of thing should be done in the application or maybe the driver, not the printer.

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