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> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance. I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I

> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance. I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time). The more AI Google applies to my life, the more I want to escape it. I remember, when it was said people pay a premium for Apple products because they want privacy. I wonder if it will also become, people migrate to Apple to escape AI.

dan-robertson 4y ago
Apple still do plenty of AI, no? Eg the whole horse-detection thing. Maybe it’s something more specific that you dislike?
- spiffytech 4y ago
  I'm with the OP. I sometimes like AI capabilities, but I don't like my phone making AI decisions or predictions on my behalf. E.g., if I open the share menu, whatever contacts and apps Google guesses are always wrong, and a simple list of whoever I've last shared with would be better. I also don't want any "smart" contextual behavior (widgets changing out throughout the day, etc.). The phone simply doesn't have enough context to know what I want from it at any given moment. I'd rather just tell it how to behave using my own judgement.
  - waisbrot 4y ago
    > a simple list of whoever I've last shared with would be better A decent AI system would include a heavy bias toward recent. Good "AI" should mostly feel like dumb heuristics. I think a good example is directions on my iPhone: when it's plugged into a car it always suggests driving directions. When there's something in my calendar soon it suggests going there. If there's not and I'm not at home it often suggests going home (it's right more than half the time). After that, it just offers a list of buttons for places I've told it about: home, work, school. I'd be annoyed if it tried to do something more clever (like suggesting the post office because I went there on this day last year). I think a key element is that I have an immediate and intuitive idea of why its suggestion is a reasonable one.
- SanjayMehta 4y ago
  Apple's AI is on your phone. It unobtrusive. Recently I needed to quickly find a company's QR code which I had photographed and Photos search found it in an instance. It even finds text inside images. Am sure Android has these features but I don't know if they work offline.
  - simplotek 4y ago
    > Apple's AI is on your phone. It unobtrusive. Recently I needed to quickly find a company's QR code which I had photographed and Photos search found it in an instance. I believe the iPhone automatically classifies photos based on who or what show up in them. Users can contribute to train classifiers, but the iPhone already works out of the box. The iPhone also creates theme-based photo albums from the photos you took. I recall it creating Christmas photo books, photo books featuring a pair of people, persons and pets, etc. This might be low-key AI, but it's the useful kind. > It even finds text inside images. I'm not sure OCR counts as AI. But yeah, the iPhone indeed does that too. We can take a photo of a telephone number or even a credit card and automatically fill in those numbers. I worked on a similar feature in the past for an unrelated project, but that was not AI though. Marketing changes though.
    - acdha 4y ago
      > I'm not sure OCR counts as AI This is a great example of the AI effect where people would call something AI when it was a daunting research problem but give it another label once it’s working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect In this case, Apple’s modern OCR is a complex neural network system which I think most people would class as an AI tool. It’s notably better than traditional approaches which were optimized for business documents.
      - simplotek 4y ago
        > It’s notably better than traditional approaches which were optimized for business documents. I'm not sure I agree, primarily because "better" is subjective. A pipeline with template matching is extremely effective at extracting fixed form text in a standard layout, such as telephone numbers or credit cards, and computationally cheap as well. But I presume a drop-in black box model which isn't bound to a low computational budget, can output plenty of false negatives and false positives, and can run on a single pipeline might be preferable at least from a product management point of view. Also, neural networks looks good on resume while template matching doesn't. Just like statician/image analyst looks lukewarm but AI engineer looks superb.
fragmede 4y ago
Apple does the same horseshit with battery charging guessing. Just give me a toggle setting for stop at 80% full.
- lukan 4y ago
  "Just give me a toggle setting for stop at 80% full." And another toggle for 100% when I do need full charge, because I go somewhere. Why such basic functionality is not avaiable, is a bit frustrating.
  - eshch 4y ago
    dunno, there is the one-time toggle in the notification area for 100% in my pixel and there is a toggle to turn off these adaptive features in settings.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      It is a feature you can easily turn off on iPhones too, it isn't hidden or obscured under bajillion menus at all. The grandparent comment just didn't bother looking for it. Settings > Battery > Battery Health and Charging. Set "Optimize Battery Charging" toggle to off, and the adaptive charging is gone.
ignoramous 4y ago
tbf, TFA points out that among some "20 AI products" Google intends to release this year are mostly in response to OpenAI: DALL-E (image creator and editor), Copilot, ChatGPT, and OpenAI APIs (low-code, browser-based).
whydid 4y ago
Notifications about printing photos are simple to configure. As are the "AI" battery charging options. Google uses AI in most of their products transparently, and we seldom realize it.
MattPalmer1086 4y ago
You are so right. I like the Pixel phones, but all the big features of the later models were about being "more helpful". Or "more annoying" as I see it. Do not want! I just have to turn off all that crap if possible.
_Algernon_ 4y ago
Instead of the focus on AI, I'd like to see something like Shortcuts on iOS, which allows users to automate frequent tasks, and due to being developed by Google it would be a first class citizen of the OS, for which app developers will add integrations. That way it at least serves the user, and not a paperclip maximiser for engagement.
- vageli 4y ago
  Google has something similar to Shortcuts, called Action Blocks.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    Doesn't provide automation (actions must be manually triggered) or extendability (app developers being incentivized to add custom actions for their apps). Seems to be just another case of a half-assed Google product which is destined to die on https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ in a few months / years, sadly.
    - vageli 4y ago
      Of course there are third party apps like Tasker that are much more capable than both action blocks and shortcuts.
      - _Algernon_ 4y ago
        They require messing with intents or web apis to do anything substantial. The original point is that the existence of Shortcuts incentivizes app developers to allow access to app functionality through custom actions. A third party automation app has no chance of building such an ecosystem. Google would have a chance.
vanviegen 4y ago
The one that bothers me most is that background services are now management by some AI thingy, in order to 'optimize battery usage'. Ergo, background services are now unreliable.
- tirpen 4y ago
  As an example, Facebook Messenger has become almost completely unusable on Android phones because the OS keeps killing the process despite the user specifically telling it to don't. I'm not 100% convinced that this is by accident.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    few years ago when I got rid of all FB apps from phone (can't recommend enough), main reason was that their apps were draining battery hard, even when not used (when deciding whether it was so much spying of devs incompetency I'll be nice and tend to incompetency). Maybe its still the case? Its bad that platform that is supposed to be more free alternative is not so much so. Similar story with me and Strava - when I record some walking, Samsung's latest android 13 sometimes tends to kill after some time the tracking thread. So my maps sometimes look like I invented teleport, pretty annoying and made the app useless and unused. I checked and Strava doesn't have any settings for this enabled.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    This varies heavily by phone manufacturer. They employ different strategies to inflate their battery life stats, and Samsung is currently the worst offender: https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    I thought phones had hooks for notifications n stuff regardless of if the app was open. Shouldn’t that cover most things you care about in the background? Am I wrong or is this different for Android (I’ve only used apple)?
    - 4y ago
blippitybleep 4y ago
I moved off Spotify to escape AI. It was good at first, but I started to feel like I was being pushed into a rut with music, that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself. I wonder if the novelty of a lot of consumer AI will wear off for others in the long run.
- super256 4y ago
  > that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself Music discovery is the best feature for me in spotify. Especially if you listen to more unpopular genres like french/german techno, old school hard trance. I found plenty of great artists there which have <5k monthly plays.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I wonder whether I got in a bad A/B test group or something - I tried Spotify after Rdio shut down but no matter how much training I gave it the recommendations kept going back to the same pop albums they were promoting. It was very weird to see after reading all of that echonest guy’s blog posts about the cool things they were doing.
    - super256 4y ago
      Somebody I know also had this issue at one point. In his case it was girlfriend which also used his account (but apparently without creating playlists or hearting anything, idk).
      - acdha 4y ago
        In my case I imported my Rdio history so it’s possible that something went wrong with a difference between loading albums & seeding the recommendation engine. It was really weird because I was expecting better based on most of the other users I knew.
        super256 4y ago

dan-robertson 4y ago

Apple still do plenty of AI, no? Eg the whole horse-detection thing. Maybe it’s something more specific that you dislike?

spiffytech 4y ago
I'm with the OP. I sometimes like AI capabilities, but I don't like my phone making AI decisions or predictions on my behalf. E.g., if I open the share menu, whatever contacts and apps Google guesses are always wrong, and a simple list of whoever I've last shared with would be better. I also don't want any "smart" contextual behavior (widgets changing out throughout the day, etc.). The phone simply doesn't have enough context to know what I want from it at any given moment. I'd rather just tell it how to behave using my own judgement.
- waisbrot 4y ago
  > a simple list of whoever I've last shared with would be better A decent AI system would include a heavy bias toward recent. Good "AI" should mostly feel like dumb heuristics. I think a good example is directions on my iPhone: when it's plugged into a car it always suggests driving directions. When there's something in my calendar soon it suggests going there. If there's not and I'm not at home it often suggests going home (it's right more than half the time). After that, it just offers a list of buttons for places I've told it about: home, work, school. I'd be annoyed if it tried to do something more clever (like suggesting the post office because I went there on this day last year). I think a key element is that I have an immediate and intuitive idea of why its suggestion is a reasonable one.
SanjayMehta 4y ago
Apple's AI is on your phone. It unobtrusive. Recently I needed to quickly find a company's QR code which I had photographed and Photos search found it in an instance. It even finds text inside images. Am sure Android has these features but I don't know if they work offline.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > Apple's AI is on your phone. It unobtrusive. Recently I needed to quickly find a company's QR code which I had photographed and Photos search found it in an instance. I believe the iPhone automatically classifies photos based on who or what show up in them. Users can contribute to train classifiers, but the iPhone already works out of the box. The iPhone also creates theme-based photo albums from the photos you took. I recall it creating Christmas photo books, photo books featuring a pair of people, persons and pets, etc. This might be low-key AI, but it's the useful kind. > It even finds text inside images. I'm not sure OCR counts as AI. But yeah, the iPhone indeed does that too. We can take a photo of a telephone number or even a credit card and automatically fill in those numbers. I worked on a similar feature in the past for an unrelated project, but that was not AI though. Marketing changes though.
  - acdha 4y ago
    > I'm not sure OCR counts as AI This is a great example of the AI effect where people would call something AI when it was a daunting research problem but give it another label once it’s working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect In this case, Apple’s modern OCR is a complex neural network system which I think most people would class as an AI tool. It’s notably better than traditional approaches which were optimized for business documents.
    - simplotek 4y ago
      > It’s notably better than traditional approaches which were optimized for business documents. I'm not sure I agree, primarily because "better" is subjective. A pipeline with template matching is extremely effective at extracting fixed form text in a standard layout, such as telephone numbers or credit cards, and computationally cheap as well. But I presume a drop-in black box model which isn't bound to a low computational budget, can output plenty of false negatives and false positives, and can run on a single pipeline might be preferable at least from a product management point of view. Also, neural networks looks good on resume while template matching doesn't. Just like statician/image analyst looks lukewarm but AI engineer looks superb.

fragmede 4y ago

Apple does the same horseshit with battery charging guessing. Just give me a toggle setting for stop at 80% full.

lukan 4y ago
"Just give me a toggle setting for stop at 80% full." And another toggle for 100% when I do need full charge, because I go somewhere. Why such basic functionality is not avaiable, is a bit frustrating.
- eshch 4y ago
  dunno, there is the one-time toggle in the notification area for 100% in my pixel and there is a toggle to turn off these adaptive features in settings.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    It is a feature you can easily turn off on iPhones too, it isn't hidden or obscured under bajillion menus at all. The grandparent comment just didn't bother looking for it. Settings > Battery > Battery Health and Charging. Set "Optimize Battery Charging" toggle to off, and the adaptive charging is gone.

ignoramous 4y ago

tbf, TFA points out that among some "20 AI products" Google intends to release this year are mostly in response to OpenAI: DALL-E (image creator and editor), Copilot, ChatGPT, and OpenAI APIs (low-code, browser-based).

whydid 4y ago

Notifications about printing photos are simple to configure. As are the "AI" battery charging options. Google uses AI in most of their products transparently, and we seldom realize it.

MattPalmer1086 4y ago

You are so right. I like the Pixel phones, but all the big features of the later models were about being "more helpful". Or "more annoying" as I see it. Do not want! I just have to turn off all that crap if possible.

_Algernon_ 4y ago

Instead of the focus on AI, I'd like to see something like Shortcuts on iOS, which allows users to automate frequent tasks, and due to being developed by Google it would be a first class citizen of the OS, for which app developers will add integrations. That way it at least serves the user, and not a paperclip maximiser for engagement.

vageli 4y ago
Google has something similar to Shortcuts, called Action Blocks.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Doesn't provide automation (actions must be manually triggered) or extendability (app developers being incentivized to add custom actions for their apps). Seems to be just another case of a half-assed Google product which is destined to die on https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ in a few months / years, sadly.
  - vageli 4y ago
    Of course there are third party apps like Tasker that are much more capable than both action blocks and shortcuts.
    - _Algernon_ 4y ago
      They require messing with intents or web apis to do anything substantial. The original point is that the existence of Shortcuts incentivizes app developers to allow access to app functionality through custom actions. A third party automation app has no chance of building such an ecosystem. Google would have a chance.

vanviegen 4y ago

The one that bothers me most is that background services are now management by some AI thingy, in order to 'optimize battery usage'. Ergo, background services are now unreliable.

tirpen 4y ago
As an example, Facebook Messenger has become almost completely unusable on Android phones because the OS keeps killing the process despite the user specifically telling it to don't. I'm not 100% convinced that this is by accident.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  few years ago when I got rid of all FB apps from phone (can't recommend enough), main reason was that their apps were draining battery hard, even when not used (when deciding whether it was so much spying of devs incompetency I'll be nice and tend to incompetency). Maybe its still the case? Its bad that platform that is supposed to be more free alternative is not so much so. Similar story with me and Strava - when I record some walking, Samsung's latest android 13 sometimes tends to kill after some time the tracking thread. So my maps sometimes look like I invented teleport, pretty annoying and made the app useless and unused. I checked and Strava doesn't have any settings for this enabled.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  This varies heavily by phone manufacturer. They employ different strategies to inflate their battery life stats, and Samsung is currently the worst offender: https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  I thought phones had hooks for notifications n stuff regardless of if the app was open. Shouldn’t that cover most things you care about in the background? Am I wrong or is this different for Android (I’ve only used apple)?
  - 4y ago

blippitybleep 4y ago

I moved off Spotify to escape AI. It was good at first, but I started to feel like I was being pushed into a rut with music, that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself. I wonder if the novelty of a lot of consumer AI will wear off for others in the long run.

super256 4y ago
> that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself Music discovery is the best feature for me in spotify. Especially if you listen to more unpopular genres like french/german techno, old school hard trance. I found plenty of great artists there which have <5k monthly plays.
- acdha 4y ago
  I wonder whether I got in a bad A/B test group or something - I tried Spotify after Rdio shut down but no matter how much training I gave it the recommendations kept going back to the same pop albums they were promoting. It was very weird to see after reading all of that echonest guy’s blog posts about the cool things they were doing.
  - super256 4y ago
    Somebody I know also had this issue at one point. In his case it was girlfriend which also used his account (but apparently without creating playlists or hearting anything, idk).
    - acdha 4y ago
      In my case I imported my Rdio history so it’s possible that something went wrong with a difference between loading albums & seeding the recommendation engine. It was really weird because I was expecting better based on most of the other users I knew.
      - super256 4y ago