Over the past few months I’ve been increasingly frustrated by AI companies trying to insert AI “help” into everything in the faint hope that something will stick and it will actually be helpful. WhatsApp seems to think that I need help responding to whether my son can go on a playdate or if my daughter can attend coaching practice. Spotify likes to cram my search with AI-generated playlists to the point where nearly half the responses are “Made for you” and I can’t actually find the track I’m looking for without scrolling down past the dross. Facebook tries to get its AI to provide further information on joke posts when clearly the AI fails to appreciate the humour and gets all serious. Google Search has become Google Explain and now I know how women feel when being mansplained to. And the most annoying thing about it all of these examples is that it seems to be impossible to turn the artificial dumbness off.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that AI can be productive and useful in other circumstances but the problem here is that the AI isn’t working for me or for you. It’s working for Meta and Google primarily to keep their advertisers happy. It’s back to the old adage, “If it’s free, you’re the product”.
What I want is that AI personal assistant beloved of sci-fi. An AI that’s a partner in life: it’s genuinely useful and works for me, not some social media company that sells your data to the highest bidder. Take the WhatsApp example above….in this instance I want my AI not to respond on my behalf, but rather check that both my and my daughter’s diaries are free on Thursday night and warn if there’s a problem. Or instead my AI might recall that I listened to a track on Spotify last week that had the search term in the song title: that’s most likely the track I’m looking for. Even better, I’d like the AI to plan healthy meals for the week ahead, taking into account taste preferences, availability of ingredients and time available to prepare.
This AI needs to be ubiquitous on my smartphone, my PC and my home assistant, but it needs to stand apart from them and not be Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Apple’s the other big player here and possibly the one with enough resources and clout to make it happen. Unfortunately, they’re likely to hobble it by keeping to the Apple ecosystem.
It needs a trustworthy independent company whose business model isn’t based on advertising – perhaps a business like Proton who are big on privacy and already offer mail, calendar and storage? Their Lumo AI is only starting out but if it had access to my email, diary and files while remaining private, it could be very compelling. It’s also a service that I’d definitely pay for – a single AI with access to all my data and activity, working for me to benefit me.