AI Is in a Weird Place Right Now
Three years into AI mania, things continue to be volatile. The items capturing buzz continue to evolve while consumers are looking at AI with increasingly divergent viewpoints.
Consider the following AI developments that have been on my radar:
Chatbot platform craze has cooled. Efforts to turn chatbots into new-age digital platforms are not going as smoothly as some companies planned. The idea of using apps within ChatGPT, not surprisingly, has flatlined. The same goes for agentic commerce. Walmart provided the latest evidence that chatbot usage isn’t trending like some proponents hoped – purchase conversion inside ChatGPT was one-third the rate of purchase conversion on Walmart’s website.
Mania has turned to utility agents. OpenClaw and Claude Code are grabbing the buzz that previously went to consumer-oriented chatbots. In the process, AI utility has become more niche and difficult to access for the mass market. ChatGPT usage
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Google Pixel’s Photo Editing Features Point to a Scary Future
Earlier this week, Google held its annual fall event for new products. Along with new hardware, Google unveiled various AI-powered editing features for photos taken on Pixel 8 smartphones. The features make me nervous about where we are headed from the perspective of AI.
Among the announcements, the following three new features stood out to me:
Best Take relies on “an on-device algorithm [that] creates a blended image from a series of photos to get everyone’s best look.” This is another way of saying a fake scene is created by swapping out one’s facial expression for a different (fake) one.
Magic Editor relies on “generative AI to help you bring your photos in line with the essence of the moment you were trying to capture.” This is another way of saying that a new scene is created by moving the subjects around.
Audio Magic Eraser “lets you easily reduce distracting sounds in your video, like howling winds or noisy crowds…[by using] advanced machine learning models to sort sounds into distinct layers so you can control their levels.”
The stated mission behind these features is a big one – redefining memories using generative AI in photography.