Youtube has been serving me videos of these gadgets that are like "personal AI assistants" for people who want to carry around an extra device that is just chatGPT with a voice prompt. It's a super weird niche because we already have phones that do the same thing. It just seems like maybe they're just kickstarter scams for gadget nerds who are bricked up over AI.
Anyways, every time I see one of these things, my cursed brain goes immediately to "god, what if I was dating someone and they had just gotten this thing after having preordered the kickstarter 6 months ago. Now they're trying to find every possible excuse to use it in order to justify getting it."
We're at a restaurant and he's like, "what are the best qualities in a carbonara," or whatever.
Please help me escape this mental prison. Why am I doing this to myself?
You're actually currently on a date with an AI gadget bazinga, and the reality you're experiencing now is a coma that your brain has put you in to protect your psyche.
Imagine having such an efficient way to telegraph to anyone that looks at you that you're a fucking loser
What if they stop you mid sentence and then hold out their hand and start making all these weird hand gestures. They're clearly struggling to navigate the UI, but they smile feebly and say "this is the future I'm telling you babe" and proceed to go on the rest of the night trying to justify the awful UI design
Oh this? Heh, just the next big thing (besides us) I'm thinking it could officiate at our wedding wouldn't that be epic
He didn't hear me break up because he's too busy fiddling with the settings. He's still on my couch. What now?
It sucks, right? One of the profs at my uni who I really respect and look up to has a course all about miniaturizing ML models to run on this kind of device. Of course it's kinda different since in his case it's all about actually running the model locally, and I think he's more interested in some sort of medical device. But it seems like this is the direction a lot of the techbro hype is going in.
I also can't help but feel like ultimately, any advances in running ML models in embedded devices are just mostly going to be used for surveillance equipment, military hardware, and robot cop dogs once the garbage AI assistant bubble pops. You can't escape hellworld.
Wot if the gadget was sentient, and the human carrying it was the bot?
[reviewer] AI pin has no screen and is voice activated. It acts as a personal assistant.
Oh so I can ask it to like, set timers or play [streaming music service] for a $700 gadget? That seems expensive but I guess Americans already buy the Amazon and Google microphones so it'd be nice to have a smaller, less evil brand doing the same thing?
You can't actually ask it to set timers
What's the fucking point. I'm sticking with hey siri.
It's a massively overpriced device for a somewhat overhyped technology. But, that alone doesn't mean much, we all get suckered in by marketing and ideas sometimes. And the device arguably has some minorly helpful uses.
I might make a joke about it, but personally, if I was in that position, I wouldn't overly worry on the basis of seeing this alone.
I found YouTube links in your post. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
