New survey suggests the vast majority of iPhone and Samsung Galaxy users find AI useless – and I’m not surprised

I hate that nowadays AI == LLM/chatbot.

I love the AI classifiers that keep me safe from spam or that help me categorise pictures. I love the AI based translators that allow me to write in virtually any language almost like a real speaker.

What I hate is these super advanced stocastic parrots that manage to pass the Turing test and, so, people assume they think.

I am pretty sure that they asked specifically about LLM/chatbots the percentage of people not caring would be even higher

Well, as a user of both, I agree.

I think the article is missing the point on two levels.

First is the significance of this data, or rather lack of significance. The internet existed for 20-some years before the majority of people felt they had a use for it. AI is similarly in a finding-its-feet phase where we know it will change the world but haven't quite figured out the details. After a period of increased integration into our lives it will reach a tipping point where it gains wider usage, and we're already very close to that.

Also they are missing what I would consider the two main reasons people don't use it yet.

First, many people just don't know what to do with it (as was the case with the early internet). The knowledge/imagination/interface/tools aren't mature enough so it just seems like a lot of effort for minimal benefits. And if the people around you aren't using it, you probably don't feel the need.

Second reason is that the thought of it makes people uncomfortable or downright scared. Quite possibly with good reason. But even if it all works out well in the end, what we're looking at is something that will drive the pace of change beyond what human nature can easily deal with. That's already a problem in the modern world but we aint seen nothing yet. The future looks impossible to anticipate, and that's scary. Not engaging with AI is arguably just hiding your head in the sand, but maybe that beats contemplating an existential terror that you're powerless to stop.

Doesn't help that I don't know what this "AI" is supposed to be doing on my phone.
Touch up a few photos on my phone? Ok go ahead, ill turn it off when I want a pure photography experience (or use a DSLR).
Text prediction? Yeah why not.. I mean, is it the little things like that?
So it feels like either these companies dont know how to use "AI" or they dont know how to market it... or more likely they know one way to market it and the marketing department is driving the development. Im sure theres good uses but it seems like they dont want to put in the work and just give us useless ones.

Not just useless but actively unwelcome.

Everybody hates AI, and these companies keep trying to push it because they're so desperate for investors. Oh, I want to be a fly on the wall of a meeting room when the bubble finally pops.

please burst that bubble already so i can get a second hand server grade gpu

I have never used this bixbi AI

It actually made my Google speakers assistant dumber because I think they're trying to merge the 2

I side graded from a iPhone 12 to an Xperia as a toy to tinker around with recently and I disabled Gemini on my phone not long after it let me join the beta.

Everything seemed half baked. Not only were the awnsers meh and it felt like an invasion of privacy after reading to user agreement. Gemini can't even play a song on your phone, or get you directions home, what an absolute joke.

My kids school just did a survey and part of it included questions about teaching technology with a big focus on the use of AI. My response was "No" full stop. They need to learn how to do traditional research first so that they can spot check the error ridden results generated by AI. Damn it school, get off the bandwagon.

Do I use Gen AI extensively?…

No but, do I find it useful?…..

Also no.

"PLEASE use our hilariously power inefficient wrongness machine."

It is, for everybody mostly.

AI is not there to be useful for you. It is there to be useful for them. It is a perfect tool for capturing every last little thought you could have and direct to you perfectly on what they can sell you.

It's basically one big way to sell you shit. I promise we will follow the same path as most tech. It'll be useful for some stuff and in this case it's being heavily forced upon us whether we like it or not. Then it's usefulness will be slowly diminished as it's used more heavily to capitalize on your data, thoughts, writings, code, and learn how to suck every last dollar from you whether you're at work or at home.

It's why DeepSeek spent so little and works better. They literally were just focusing on the tech.

All these billions are not just being spent on hardware or better optimized software. They are being spent on finding the best ways to profit from these AI systems. It's why they're being pushed into everything.

You won't have a choice on whether you want to use it or not. It'll soon by the only way to interact with most systems even if it doesn't make sense.

Mark my words. When Google stops standard search on their home page and it's a fucking AI chat bot by default. We are not far off from that.

It's not meant to be useful for you.

Students are currently one of the major benefactors of LLMs lol.

I do not need it, and I hate how it's constantly forced upon me.

Current AI feels like the Metaverse. There's no demand for it or need for it, yet they're trying their damndest to shove it into anything and everything like it's a new miracle answer to every problem that doesn't exist yet.

And all I see it doing is making things worse. People use it to write essays in school; that just makes them dumber because they don't have to show they understand the topic they're writing. And considering AI doesn't exactly have a flawless record when it comes to accuracy, relying on it for anything is just not a good idea currently.

Am I crazy? I’ve got this thing writing code and listing website listings. I ask it certain things before Google and just have it give me the source. I use it to sum up huge documents to quickly analyze them before I go through them. Feels like how Google felt I when it first came out. Yall using the same ai?

(Apple ai is not what I’m talking about)

I planned to skip this generation, assuming this would be the year of useless ai cramming, even though my phone was getting old. Samsung was so desperate to sell s25s upgrading was essentially less than staying with my current model. Bought it, and turned all that mess off

Not only that, but Google assistant is getting consistently less reliable. Like half the time now I ask it a question and it just does an image search or something or completely misunderstands me in some other manner. They deserted working, decent tech for unreliable, unwanted tech because ???

Tbf most people have no clue how to use it nor even understand what "AI" even is.

I just taught my mom how to use circle to search and it's a real game changer for her. She can quickly lookup on-screen items (like plants shes reading about) from an image and the on-screen translation is incredible.

Also circle to search gets around link and text copy blocking giving you back the same freedoms you had on a PC.

Personally I'd never go back to a phone without circle to search - its so under-rated and a giant shift in smartphone capabilities.

Its very likely that we'll have full live screen reading assistants in the near future which can perform circle to search like functions and even visual modifications live. It's easy to dismiss this as a gimmick but there's a lot of incredible potential here especially for casual and older users.

only corporations ever pushed it, customers do not want it or need it.

As an android user (Pixel), I've only ever opened AI by accident. My work PC is a mac and it force-reenables apple intelligence after every update. I dutifully go into settings and disable that shit. While summarizing things is something AI can be good at, I generally want to actually read the detail of work communications since, as a software engineer, detail is a teeeny bit important.

I only really use AI shit on my work computer (because hooray I have a Copilot license), and its only marginally better than doing searches myself. Its nice when it works because it lets me save time researching things, but I CONSTANTLY have to ask "are you sure that's real?" because it just fucking makes up random command flags based on the prompt.

And its only marginally better because fucking search engines have their head so far up their ass they can see their tonsils. Godsdammit I want working search engines back.

Ai is a waste of time for me; I don't want it on my phone , I don't want it on my computer and I block it every time I have the chance. But I might be old fashioned in that I don't like algorithms recommending anything to me either. I never cared what the all seeing machine has to say.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that it’s useless.

I want a voice assistant that can set timers for me and search the internet maybe play music from an app I select. I only ever use it when I am cooking something and don't have my hands free to do those things.

Ai sucks and is a waste of humanity’s resources. I hate how everything goes on buzzwords industry trends. This shit needs to stop and just focus on simplicity and reliability. We need to stop trying to sell new things every cycle

Id take Bixby back over this forced AI crap.

I mean I wouldn't but you know....

A 100% accurate AI would be useful. A 99.999% accurate AI is in fact useless, because of the damage that one miss might do.

It's like the French say: Add one drop of wine in a barrel of sewage and you get sewage. Add one drop of sewage in a barrel of wine and you get sewage.

Nothing bores me more than their events that focus on AI.

Yeah? Well I fucking love it on my iPhone. It's summaries have been amazing, almost prescient. No, Siri hasn't turned my phone into a Holodeck yet but I'm okay with that.

The AI thing I'd really like is an on-device classifier that decides with reasonably high reliability whether I would want my phone to interrupt me with a given notification or not. I already don't allow useless notifications, but a message from a friend might be a question about something urgent, or a cat picture.

What I don't want is:

• Ways to make fake photographs
• Summaries of messages I could just skim the old fashioned way
• Easier access to LLM chatbots

It seems like those are the main AI features bundled on phones now, and I have no use for any of them.

It's all just to get more data from you so it can monetized.

Unless it can be a legit personal assistant, I’m not actually interested. Companies hyped AI way too much.

I'm shocked, I tell you. Absolutely shocked. And if you believe that, I got some oceanfront property in Arizona. I'll sell you too.

Just look at Smart Speakers. Basically the early AI at home. People just used them to set timers and ask about the weather. Even though it was capable of much more. Google and others were unable to monetize them for this reason and have mostly given up. (Protip: if you have a google speaker and kids, ask about the animal of the day. It's an addition during COVID times for kids learning at home.)

But people also aren't used to AI yet. Most will still google for something, some already skip that step and have ChatGPT search and summarize. I would not be surprised if the internet of the future is just plain text files for the AI agents to scrape.

AI is useless and I block it anyway I can.

AI was never meant for the average person but the average person had to be convinced it was for funding.

"Stop trying to make fetch AI happen. It's not going to happen."

AI is worse that adding no value, it is an actual detriment.

I like the idea of generating emojis with Ai on phones. All other use cases that apple has presented seem useless to me. I was really hoping it would be something, anything, but it was just underwhelming. And then apple didnt even have it ready for the iphone 16 at launch but said the phone was built for apple intelligence..? Seems kinda rushed and half baked to me. I also like using copilot is vscode. Its proven to be pretty good at helping me debug

"useless" is a more positive impression than I have.

It's possible that people don't realize what is AI and what is an AI marketing speak out there nowadays.

For a fully automated Her-like experience, or Ironman style Jarvis? That would be rad. But we have not really close to that at all. It sort of exists with LLM chat, but the implementation on phones is not even close to being there.

Sometimes I wonder what is going to happen to all this tech in 4 or so years when its less profitable to keep the AI centers on.

Right now they are "free" because of all the investment that is going on. But they have a huge maintenance/energy cost.

Anyone who has been paying attention has been waiting for this enormous bag of shit to explode already.

On Samsung they got rid of a perfectly good screenshot tool and replaced it with one that has AI, it's slower, clunky, and not as good, I just want them to revert it. If I wanted AI I'd download an app.

I love the AI features for photos of my galaxy, but other than that I don't use it

Surprise surprise!

At work we deal with valuable information and we gotta be careful what to ask. Probably we'll have a total ban on these things at work.

At home we don't give a fuck what your AI does. I just wanna relax and do nothing for as long as I can. So off load your AI onto a local system that doesn't talk to your server and then we'll talk.

The first thing I do with a new phone is turn off any kind of assistance.

Honestly I can't say I've ever had a reason to use it on my phone.

AI is useless for most people because it does not solve any problems for day to day people. The most common use is to make their emails sound less angry and frustrated.

AI is useful for tech people, makes reading documentation or learning anything new a million times better. And when the AI does get something wrong, you'll know eventually because what you learned from the AI won't work in real life, which is part of the normal learning process anyways.

It is great as a custom tutor, but other than that it really doesn't make anything of substance by itself.

AI SLOP!

Personally, I am just not going to use the smallest screen I own to do most of the tasks they are pushing AI for. They can keep making them bigger and it’s still just going to be a phone first. If this is what they want then why can’t I just have the Watch and an iPad?

Artificial Incompetence

The only thing I want AI (on my phone) to do is limit my notifications and make calendar events for me. I don't want to ask questions. I don't want to start conversations.

I want to open my phone and have 1 summary notification of things I received and things to do. I want the spammy ones to just be auto filtered because I never click on them.

I'd also love if I could choose when to manage all of these notifications with my AI assistant. The only back and forth I'd like is around scheduling if I need to make changes.

I found AI tools awesome for removing objects in photos or transcribing a conversation. Other than that it's useless because it's not reliable.

It would have to have a 'use' to qualify as anything else. It takes longer to ask it to do anything than it does to just do it yourself. Plus they want you to call it up by their retard brand name, 'hey, gemini' or 'okay, google' is cringey AF.

I cant wait until you get dumb siri for free but it only tells time and the paid version cost 25 a month but it also sets alarms.

The only Galaxy AI feature I find even a bit amusing is Portrait Studio, which can turn a photo of someone into an AI generated comic or 3D picture. But only as long as it remains free, it's not something worth paying for.

Can it generate weird porn locally?

maybe if it was able to do anything useful (like tell me where specific settings that I can't remember the name of but know what they do are on my phone) people would consider them slightly helpful. But instead of making targeted models that know device specific information the companies insist on making generic models that do almost nothing well.

If the model was properly integrated into the assistant AND the assistant properly integrated into the phone AND the assistant had competent scripting abilities (looking at you Google, filth that broke scripts relying on recursion) then it would probably be helpful for smart home management by being able to correctly answer "are there lights on in rooms I'm not?" and respond with something like "yes, there are 3 lights on. Do you want me to turn them off". But it seems that the companies want their products to fail. Heck if the assistant could even do a simple on device task like "take a one minute video and send it to friend A" or "strobe the flashlight at 70 BPM" or "does epubfile_on_device mention the cheeto in office" or even just know how itis being ran (Gemini when ran from the Google assistant doesn't).

edit: I suppose it might be useful to waste someone else's time.

Count me in!

I don’t use the A.I. features on iOS or Android — I have both for developer reasons — but I do like the new Siri animation better than the old one. So, not a total waste of time and money. More of a 99.999% waste of time and money.

Maybe it’s useful for people who work in marketing or whatever. Like you write some copy and you ask it to rewrite it in different tones and send them all to your client to see what vibe they want. But I already include the exact right amount of condescension expected in an email from a developer.

I hate it 🤷 I keep it turned off anywhere that I can.

The only AI thing I use on my Fold is the photo cropping, definitely nifty to just pull out a subject, it's not perfect ofc but way easier then manually trying to cut it out lol.

I need AI summaries a lot less than I would prefer a smart mail filter to actually remove all the spam email and texts.

hurry up and get Siri integrated with chatGPT and it'll be a lot more useful.

Outside of some education and medical scenarios, I have yet to hear of any truly useful AI.