My kids school just did a survey and part of it included questions about teaching technology with a big focus on the use of AI. My response was "No" full stop. They need to learn how to do traditional research first so that they can spot check the error ridden results generated by AI. Damn it school, get off the bandwagon.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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I say this as an education major, and former teacher. That being said, please keep fighting your PTA on this.
We didn't get actually useful information in high school, partially because our parents didn't think there was anything wrong with the curriculum.
I'm absolutely certain that there are multiple subjects that you may have skipped out on, if you'd had any idea that civics, shop, home economics, and maybe accounting were going to be the closest classes to "real world skills that all non collegate educated people still need to know."
I regret not taking shop and home economics. Filing taxes and balancing checkbooks would be good skills to learn also.
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Do I use Gen AI extensively?…
No but, do I find it useful?…..
Also no.
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A 100% accurate AI would be useful. A 99.999% accurate AI is in fact useless, because of the damage that one miss might do.
It's like the French say: Add one drop of wine in a barrel of sewage and you get sewage. Add one drop of sewage in a barrel of wine and you get sewage.
I think it largely depends on what kind of AI we're talking about. iOS has had models that let you extract subjects from images for a while now, and that's pretty nifty. Affinity Photo recently got the same feature. Noise cancellation can also be quite useful.
As for LLMs? Fuck off, honestly. My company apparently pays for MS CoPilot, something I only discovered when the garbage popped up the other day. I wrote a few random sentences for it to fix, and the only thing it managed to consistently do was screw the entire text up. Maybe it doesn't handle Swedish? I don't know.
One of the examples I sent to a friend is as follows, but in Swedish;
Microsoft CoPilot is an incredibly poor product. It has a tendency to make up entirely new, nonsensical words, as well as completely mangle the grammar. I really don't understand why we pay for this. It's very disappointing.
And CoPilot was like "yeah, let me fix this for you!"
Microsoft CoPilot is a comedy show without a manuscript. It makes up new nonsense words as though were a word-juggler on circus, and the grammar becomes mang like a bulldzer over a lawn. Why do we pay for this? It is buy a ticket to a show where actosorgets their lines. Entredibly disappointing.
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It's really pointless to most people, it has its use case. But it was just a hype train everyone got on like a few years ago many did with blockchain, another nice technology but only for certain use cases. I don't want nor need an always on AI to search through my phone and spy on me. I have already had overbearing exes try that. It's actually a big reason I am considering switching to a Pixel 10 as my next phone and just installing Graphene OS and calling it a day as my daily driver.
I do not need it, and I hate how it's constantly forced upon me.
Current AI feels like the Metaverse. There's no demand for it or need for it, yet they're trying their damndest to shove it into anything and everything like it's a new miracle answer to every problem that doesn't exist yet.
And all I see it doing is making things worse. People use it to write essays in school; that just makes them dumber because they don't have to show they understand the topic they're writing. And considering AI doesn't exactly have a flawless record when it comes to accuracy, relying on it for anything is just not a good idea currently.
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It actually made my Google speakers assistant dumber because I think they're trying to merge the 2
Doesn't help that I don't know what this "AI" is supposed to be doing on my phone.
Touch up a few photos on my phone? Ok go ahead, ill turn it off when I want a pure photography experience (or use a DSLR).
Text prediction? Yeah why not.. I mean, is it the little things like that?
So it feels like either these companies dont know how to use "AI" or they dont know how to market it... or more likely they know one way to market it and the marketing department is driving the development. Im sure theres good uses but it seems like they dont want to put in the work and just give us useless ones.
Useless for us, but not for them. They want us to use them like personalised confidante-bots so they can harvest our most intimate data
I recently got apple intelligence on my phone, and i had to google around to see what it really does. i couldn't quite figure it out to be honest. I think it is related to siri somehow (which i have turned off, because why would that be on?) and apparently it could tie into an apple watch (which i don't have), so i eventually concluded that it doesn't do anything as of right now. Might be wrong though.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that it’s useless.
I don't think it's meant to be useful....for us, that is. Just another tool to control and brainwash people. I already see a segment of the population trust corporate AI as an authority figure in their lives. Now imagine kids growing up with AI and never knowing a world without. People who have memories of times before the internet is a good way to relate/empathize, at least I think so.
How could it not be this way? Algorithms trained people. They're trained to be fed info from the rich and never seek anything out on their own. I'm not really sure if the corps did it on purpose or not, at least at first. Just money pursuit until powerful realizations were made. I look at the declining quality of Google/Youtube search results. As if they're discouraging seeking out information on your own. Subtly pushing the path of least resistance back to the algorithm or now perhaps a potentially much more sinister "AI" LLM chatbot. Or I'm fucking crazy, you tell me.
Like, we say dead internet. Except...nothing is actually stopping us from ditching corporate internet websites and just go back to smaller privately owned or donation run forums.
Big part of why I'm happy to be here on the newfangled fediverse, even if it hasn't exploded in popularity at least it has like-minded people, or you wouldn't be here.
Check out debate boards. Full of morons using ChatGPT to speak for them and they'll both openly admit it and get mad at you for calling it dehumanizing and disrespectful.
/tinfoil hat
Edit to add more old man yells at clouds(ervers) detail, apologies. Kinda chewing through these complex ideas on the fly.
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Ai is a waste of time for me; I don't want it on my phone , I don't want it on my computer and I block it every time I have the chance. But I might be old fashioned in that I don't like algorithms recommending anything to me either. I never cared what the all seeing machine has to say.
Generative AI is peaking in it's ability to produce cringe boomer memes from a prompt. Everything else.. MEH.
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AI is not there to be useful for you. It is there to be useful for them. It is a perfect tool for capturing every last little thought you could have and direct to you perfectly on what they can sell you.
It's basically one big way to sell you shit. I promise we will follow the same path as most tech. It'll be useful for some stuff and in this case it's being heavily forced upon us whether we like it or not. Then it's usefulness will be slowly diminished as it's used more heavily to capitalize on your data, thoughts, writings, code, and learn how to suck every last dollar from you whether you're at work or at home.
It's why DeepSeek spent so little and works better. They literally were just focusing on the tech.
All these billions are not just being spent on hardware or better optimized software. They are being spent on finding the best ways to profit from these AI systems. It's why they're being pushed into everything.
You won't have a choice on whether you want to use it or not. It'll soon by the only way to interact with most systems even if it doesn't make sense.
Mark my words. When Google stops standard search on their home page and it's a fucking AI chat bot by default. We are not far off from that.
It's not meant to be useful for you.
Yes, it seems like no one even read the damn user agreement. AI just adds another level to our surveillance state. Its only there to collect information about you and to figure out the inner workings of its users minds to sell ads. Gemini even listens to your conversations if you have the quick access toggle enabled.
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Not only that, but Google assistant is getting consistently less reliable. Like half the time now I ask it a question and it just does an image search or something or completely misunderstands me in some other manner. They deserted working, decent tech for unreliable, unwanted tech because ???
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only corporations ever pushed it, customers do not want it or need it.
I side graded from a iPhone 12 to an Xperia as a toy to tinker around with recently and I disabled Gemini on my phone not long after it let me join the beta.
Everything seemed half baked. Not only were the awnsers meh and it felt like an invasion of privacy after reading to user agreement. Gemini can't even play a song on your phone, or get you directions home, what an absolute joke.
Ironically, on my Xperia 1 VI (which I specifically chose as my daily driver because of all the compromises on flagship phones from other brands) I had the only experience where I actually felt like a smartphone feature based on machine learning helped my experience, even though the Sony phones had practically no marketing with the AI buzzwords at all.
Sony actually trained a machine learning model for automatically identifying face and eye location for human and animal subjects in the built-in camera app, in order to be able to keep the face of your subject in focus at all time regardless how they move around. Allegedly it's a very clever solution trained for identifying skeletal position to in turn identify head and eye positions, it works particularly well for when your subject moves around quickly which is where this is especially helpful.
And it works so incredibly well, wayyyyy better than any face tracking I had on any other smartphone or professional camera, it made it so so much easier for me to take photos and videos of my super active kitten and pet mice lol
That's pretty neat, I think that's a great example of how machine learning being useful for everyday activities. Face detection on cameras has been a big issue ever since the birth of digital photography. I'm using a Japanese 5 III that I picked up for $130 and its been great. I've heard of being able to side load camera apps from other Xperias onto the 5 III so I'll give it a try.
I think Sony makes great hardware and their phones have some classy designs and I'm also a fan of their DSLR'S. I've always admired there phones going back to the Ericson Walkmans, their designs have aged amazingly. I apreciate how close to stock Sony's Xperia phones are, I dont like UI's and bloatware you cant remove. My last Android phone a Galaxy S III was terrible in that regard and put me off from buying another Android until recently. I was actually thinking about getting a 1 VI as my next phone and install lineage on it now that I'm ready to commit.
I totally agree with the AOSP-like ROM and I love it so much too, especially since Sony also makes it super straightforward to root (took me less than 10 minutes) with no artificial function limitations after root (unlike the Samsung models where you can even root at all), so a highly AOSP-like ROM also means a lot of the cook OS customization tools originally developed for Pixel phones, where most of such community development efforts are focused on, tend to mostly work too on th Xperia phones :p
For side-loading Sony native apps from other models, I tried the old pro video recording app from previous gen (the Cinema Pro) on my Xperia 1 VI just for curiosity (since the new unified camera app with all the pro camera and pro video features included in a single app is definitely an usability improvement lol), and it worked fine, so it might work too if you side-load the new camera app onto your older model, feel free to DM me if you're interested to experiment with this and I can try the various methods for exporting that app and send to you.
Although Lineage OS is not yet available for the gen VI model since it only came out in 2024, however the previous gen V model got its first Lineage OS release in around September, 2024, so it might not take that long to get Lineage OS for the gen VI model :D
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As an android user (Pixel), I've only ever opened AI by accident. My work PC is a mac and it force-reenables apple intelligence after every update. I dutifully go into settings and disable that shit. While summarizing things is something AI can be good at, I generally want to actually read the detail of work communications since, as a software engineer, detail is a teeeny bit important.
AI is useless and I block it anyway I can.
"Stop trying to make ~~fetch~~ AI happen. It's not going to happen."
AI is worse that adding no value, it is an actual detriment.
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Nothing bores me more than their events that focus on AI.
It actually gets in my way every time it does something so that I have stop what I'm doing to kill it. Would love to be able to uninstall it
The AI thing I'd really like is an on-device classifier that decides with reasonably high reliability whether I would want my phone to interrupt me with a given notification or not. I already don't allow useless notifications, but a message from a friend might be a question about something urgent, or a cat picture.
What I don't want is:
- Ways to make fake photographs
- Summaries of messages I could just skim the old fashioned way
- Easier access to LLM chatbots
It seems like those are the main AI features bundled on phones now, and I have no use for any of them.
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Everybody hates AI, and these companies keep trying to push it because they're so desperate for investors. Oh, I want to be a fly on the wall of a meeting room when the bubble finally pops.
Ai sucks and is a waste of humanity’s resources. I hate how everything goes on buzzwords industry trends. This shit needs to stop and just focus on simplicity and reliability. We need to stop trying to sell new things every cycle
Tbf most people have no clue how to use it nor even understand what "AI" even is.
I just taught my mom how to use circle to search and it's a real game changer for her. She can quickly lookup on-screen items (like plants shes reading about) from an image and the on-screen translation is incredible.
Also circle to search gets around link and text copy blocking giving you back the same freedoms you had on a PC.
Personally I'd never go back to a phone without circle to search - its so under-rated and a giant shift in smartphone capabilities.
Its very likely that we'll have full live screen reading assistants in the near future which can perform circle to search like functions and even visual modifications live. It's easy to dismiss this as a gimmick but there's a lot of incredible potential here especially for casual and older users.
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Unless it can be a legit personal assistant, I’m not actually interested. Companies hyped AI way too much.
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