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Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

juno-labs.com

91–100 of 178 posts

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

#91
The product that’s being implicitly advertised here is supposed to ship at the end of this year and there doesn’t even appear to be a real photo of the thing and if that’s an indicator of the quality of the product then I must assume that it is poor and the people responsible also apparently do not have the money to hire a capable web designer and I’m sorry if this is harsh or unnecessary but I never thought I would miss the generic Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever bougie framework other companies use because boy the layout here does not elicit great expectations for their product either and I’m worried that if it ever does ship that nefarious parties will intercept all the private communications of its unfortunate owners and in an ironic sort of way their devices will become the first sort of reverse ad agent that does not transmit advertisements but receives advertisements in the form of the raw interests of their clients fed to said nefarious parties and then laundered through more traditional channels.

A man-in-the-middle-of-the-middle-man.

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

#92

This isn't a technology issue. Regulation is the only sane way to address the issue. For once,we (as the technologists) have a free translator to laymen speak via the frontier LLMs, which can be an opportunity to educate the masses as to the exact world on the horizon.

You could start by not buying an always-on AI device. Just saying.

(The article is an AI ad.)

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

#94
post #40
post #39

> Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company Apple? [1] [1] https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/

Yes, Apple is an ad company. Their annual ad revenue is in the billions, and climbing every year.

Its always fascinating that HN crowd seems to be blind to Apple's very obvious transgressions.

Even the article makes the mistake. They paint every company with a broad brush ("all AI companies are ad companies") but for Apple they are more sympathetic "We can quibble about Apple".

Apple's reality distort field is so strong. People still think they are not in ad business. People still think they stand up to government, and folks chose to ignore hard evidence (Apple operates in China on CCP's pleasure. Apple presents a gold plaque to President Trump to curry favors and removes ICEBlock apps ..) There's no pushback, there's no spine.

Every company is disgusting. Apple is hypocritical and disgusting.

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

#95
post #23
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…

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.

I want a hardware switch for the microphone. If it can hear the wake word it's already listening.

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

#96
One point I see less discussed, not related to the post, is "We never trained people to pay for software. If there existed proper global payment mechanism for software companies, the whole trajectory would look different. People are ok to pay 5$ for a coffee but not for software which makes their lives easier."

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

#100
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you need to pause and rethink your life. If you can't think of an always-on AI that listens but doesn't cause any horrors (even though its improbable to get to the market in the world we live on), I urge you to exercise your imagination. Surely, it's possible to think of an optimistic scenario? Even more so, if you think technology is here to unconditionally screw us up no matter what. Honestly - when the world is…

Not only is it improbable, it's a complete fantasy. It's not going to happen. And personally, I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme, and that's not even factoring in the inevitable Facebook-esque monetisation. >when the world is so gloomy, seek something nice, even if a fantasy I don't…

> I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme

Could that be because you're putting some extra substance in what you call an "AI"? Giving it some properties that it doesn't necessarily have?

Because when I'm thinking about "AI" all I'm giving to it is "a machine doing math at scale that allows us to have meaningful relation with human concepts as expressed in a natural language". I don't put anything extra in it, which allows me to say "AI can do good things while avoiding bad things". Surely, a machine can be made to crunch numbers and put words together in a way that helps me rather than harms me.

Oh, and if anything - I don't want "AI" to save me thinking. It cannot do that for me anyway, in principle. I want it to help me do things it machines finally start to do acceptably well: remember and relate things together. This said, yea, I guess I was generous with just a single requirement - now I can see that a personal "AI" also needs its classifications (interpretations) to match with the individual user's expectations as close as possible at all times.

> It's not going to happen.

I can wholeheartedly agree as far as "it is extremely unlikely to happen", but... to say "it is not going to happen", after last five years of "that wasn't on my bingo list"? How can you be so sure? How do we know there won't be some more weird twists of history? Call me naive but I rather want to imagine something nice would happen for a change. And it's not beyond fathomable that something crashes and the resulting waves, would possibly bring us towards a somewhat better world.

Touching grass is important, and it helps a lot, but as soon as you're back - nothing goes anywhere in the meanwhile. The society with all the mess doesn't disappear while we stop looking. So seeking an optimistic possibility is also important, even if it may seem utterly unrealistic. I guess one just have to have something to believe in?

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