well that’s sort of the point of this comic because the one thing you’d really want it to be good enough to do and would love to be able to trust something to do for you is the tax and all the other tasks in the comics are things you were pretty well able to do yourself before, probably wanted to do before, and if not exactly wanted, at least didn’t want something else to displace you in by taking over doing that task from now onwards especially if it was your actual job before. If displacing human workers for those tasks was the only problem, it’d be a sad but familiar story of progress but the fact that AI, at least for now is incapable of doing the part we’d all really love to have done for us is just the diarrhea icing on the dog turd cake.

Yeh I think we are owed this story as the price for our debatably useful replies

GenZ is sitting quietly reading a printed newspaper and only speaks in a universally recognizable lexicon with no cohort specific affectations?

This along with much else that’s pointed out make the whole devices capturing audio to process keywords for ads all seem unlikely, but, one thing worth pointing out is that people do sell bad products that barely or even just plain old don’t do what they told their customers it would do. Someone could sell a listening to keywords to target ads solution to interested advertisers that just really sucks and is super shit at its job. From the device user’s standpoint it’d be a small comfort to know the device was listening to your conversations but also really sucked at it and often thought you were saying something totally different to what you said but I’d still be greatly dismayed that they were attempting, albeit poorly, to listen to my conversations.

I don’t know why, given recent impressive developments, but I’ve always met thie idea that this is really happening with heavy skepticism and I still do. This is definitely the most concrete thing I’ve ever heard and I definitely don’t doubt companies would do this, I just… I don’t know, it’s hard to believe they really are.

One reason is it just seems like they’d be absolutely overwhelmed by useless data, it’s not like AI is cheap to run, and it’d be so hard to link a conversation that’s captured to a genuine sentiment and then to an ad connecting to that person and then a purchasing decision to that ad. This is scary for sure but it feels like this is more marketing hype to marketeers than a real thing.

Will be watching closely. I feel like this might actually be that bridge too far that the mainstream of society will demand action be taken against if it gets widely adopted and widely known. Even if it technically works and is provably effective to advertisers I think you’d need Google or Amazon to be the ones pulling it off and to have done so silently so we all just kinda assume they’re doing it but don’t know. If a company “starts” offering this service in a way the public can latch on to it would likely cause a massive backlash that would hopefully scupper such plans.

It was one nipple ring to rule them all.

I once had a dream really similar to this. It was for a multi-year long crucial to the fate of humanity expedition of some kind though and I was supposed to have been training for it with my shipmates for years. Somehow I forgot this until the day of launch itself and I tried to sort of wing it but the crew and especially the captain gave me some really filthy looks and were really pissed that I was jeopardizing the mission with my amateurism and made a mockery of all the work they put in training for the past few years.

I’ve heard so many mentions of this Spotify wrap thing today and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of it. I mean, I know I’m out of touch, but why after getting away with never knowing about it for what seems to have been a long time am I suddenly inescapably confronted with it?

I think some of them reckon the disc is moving “forward” at speed .

I didn’t make it clear but I was referring really to all the bastards of the world, generally here, Apple included for doing this, but them and all the other bastards doing bastard things too.

Oh my god will the bastards never stop?

Why can’t I full screen it?