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Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

juno-labs.com

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Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#61

Post by dotancohen »

yndoendo wrote: post #45
BoxFour wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s definitely a strange pitch, because the target audience (the privacy-conscious crowd) is exactly the type who will immediately spot all the issues you just mentioned. It's difficult to think of any privacy-conscious individual who wouldn't want, at bare minimum, a wake word (and more likely just wouldn't use anything like this period). The non privacy-conscious will just use Google/etc.

A good example of this is what one of my family member's partner said. "Isn't creep that you just talked about something and now you are seeing ads for it. Guess we just have to accept it." My response was no I don't get any of that because I disable that technology since it is always listening and can never be trusted. There is no privacy in those services. They did not like that response.

I used to be considered a weirdo and creep because I would answer the question of why don't I have WhatsApp with the answer "I do not accept their terms of service". Now people accept this answer.

I don't know what changed, but the general public is starting to figure out that that actually can disagree with large tech companies.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#62

Post by dotancohen »

com2kid wrote: post #26
paxys wrote: post #16

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company ( https://juno-labs.com/ ) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (inc…

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Typically not how these things work. Speech is processed using ASR (automatic speech recognition), and then ran through a prompt that checks for appropriate tools calls. I've been meaning to basically make this myself but I've been too lazy lately to bother. I actually want a lot…

  > Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about.
I push a button on the phone and then say them. I've been doing this for over twenty years. The problem is ever getting back to those voice notes.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#63

Post by gpm »

sxp wrote: post #4

The article is forgetting about Anthropic which currently has the best agentic programmer and was the backbone for the recent OpenClaw assistants.

Also Mistral, which is definitely building AI assistants even if they aren't quite as successful so far.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#64

Post by fwipsy »

econ wrote: post #59

Just when you've asked if there are eggs the doorbell rings, the neighbor stands there in disbelief, it told me to bring you eggs? Give him the half bottle vodka, it's going to expire soon and his son will make a surprise visit tonight. An argument arises and it participates by encouraging both parties with extra talking points. But this was only the beginning, after gathering a few TB worth of micro expressions it s…

I'm invested in this scenario now, you should write a short story.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#65

Post by dbtc »

drdaeman wrote: post #57
paxys wrote: post #16

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company ( https://juno-labs.com/ ) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (inc…

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Is this somehow fundamentally different from having memories? Because I thought about it, and decided that personally I do - with one important condition, though. I do because my memories are not as great as I would like them to be, and they decline with stress and age. If a machi…

This will not augment memory the way glasses do for sight, this will replace memory the way a wheelchair replaces legs.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#66

Post by encom »

drdaeman wrote: post #57
paxys wrote: post #16

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company ( https://juno-labs.com/ ) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (inc…

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Is this somehow fundamentally different from having memories? Because I thought about it, and decided that personally I do - with one important condition, though. I do because my memories are not as great as I would like them to be, and they decline with stress and age. If a machi…

>That's why we have technology in the first place, to improve our lives, right?

No, we have technology to show you more and more ads, sell you more and more useless crap, and push your opinions on Important Matters toward the state approved ones.

Of course indoor plumbing, farming, metallurgy and printing were great hits, but technology has had a bit of a dry spell lately.

If "An always-on AI that listens to your household" doesn't make you recoil in horror, you need to pause and rethink your life.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#67

Post by shevy-java »

> The most helpful AI will also be the most intimate technology ever built. It will hear everything. See everything

Big Brother is watching you. Who knew it would be AI ...

The author is quite right. It will be an advertisement scam. I wonder whether people will accept that though. Anyone remembers ublock origin? Google killed it on chrome. People are not going to forget that. (It still works fine on Firefox but Google bribed Firefox into submission; all that Google ad money made Firefox weak.)

Recently I had to use google search again. I was baffled at how useless it became - not just from the raw results but the whole UI - first few entries are links to useless youtube videos (also owned by Google). I don't have time to watch a video; I want the text info and extract it quickly. Using AI "summaries" is also useless - Google is just trying to waste my time compared to the "good old days". After those initial videos to youtube, I get about 6 results, three of which are to some companies writing articles so people visit their boring website. Then I get "other people searched for candy" and other useless links. I never understood why I would care what OTHER people search for when I want to search for something. Is this now group-search? Group-think 1984? And then after that, I get some more videos at youtube.

Google is clearly building a watered-down private variant of the web. Same problem with AMP pages. Google is annoying us - and has become a huge problem. (I am writing this on thorium right now, which is also chrome-based; Firefox does not allow me to play videos with audio as I don't have or use pulseaudio whereas the chrome-based browser does not care and my audio works fine - that shows you the level of incompetency at Mozilla. They don't WANT to compete against Google anymore. And did not want since decades. Ladybird unfortunately also is not going to change anything; after I critisized one of their decisions, they banned me. Well, that's a great way to try to build up an alternative when you deal with criticism via censorship - all before leaving alpha or beta already. Now imagine the amount of censorship you will get once millions of people WERE to use it ... something is fundamentally wrong with the whole modern web, and corporations have a lot to do with this; to a lesser extent also people but of course not all of them)

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#68

Post by shevy-java »

drdaeman wrote: post #57
paxys wrote: post #16

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company ( https://juno-labs.com/ ) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (inc…

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Is this somehow fundamentally different from having memories? Because I thought about it, and decided that personally I do - with one important condition, though. I do because my memories are not as great as I would like them to be, and they decline with stress and age. If a machi…

Memories are usually private. People can make them public via a blog.

AI feels more like an organized sniffing tool here.

> If a product passes those criteria, then it - by design - cannot violate others' privacy

A product can most assuredly violate privacy. Just look how Facebook gathered offline data to interconnect people to reallife data points, without their consent - and without them knowing. That's why I call it Spybook.

Ever since the USA became hostile to Canadians and Europeans this has also become much easier to deal with anyway - no more data is to be given to US companies.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#70

Post by dasil003 »

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I don't understand the appeal of the always-on AI assistant at all. Even leaving privacy/security issues aside, and even if it gets super smart and capable, it feels like it would have a distancing effect from my own life, and undermine my own agency in shaping it.

I'm not against AI in general, and some assistant-like functionality that functions on demand to search my digital footprint and handle necessary but annoying administrative tasks seems useful. But it feels like at some point it becomes a solution looking for a problem, and to squeeze out the last ounce of context-aware automation and efficiency you would have to outsource parts of your core mental model and situational awareness of your life. Imagine being over-scheduled like an executive who's assistant manages their calendar, but it's not a human it's a computer, and instead of it being for the purpose of maximizing the leverage of your attention as a captain of industry, it's just to maintain velocity on a personal rat race of your own making with no especially wide impact, even on your own psyche.

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