New survey suggests the vast majority of iPhone and Samsung Galaxy users find AI useless – and I’m not surprised
New survey suggests the vast majority of iPhone and Samsung Galaxy users find AI useless – and I’m not surprised
Apathetic indifference
A survey of more than 2,000 smartphone users by second-hand smartphone marketplace SellCell found that 73% of iPhone users and a whopping 87% of Samsung Galaxy users felt that AI adds little to no value to their smartphone experience.
SellCell only surveyed users with an AI-enabled phone – thats an iPhone 15 Pro or newer or a Galaxy S22 or newer. The survey doesn’t give an exact sample size, but more than 1,000 iPhone users and more than 1,000 Galaxy users were involved.
Further findings show that most users of either platform would not pay for an AI subscription: 86.5% of iPhone users and 94.5% of Galaxy users would refuse to pay for continued access to AI features.
From the data listed so far, it seems that people just aren’t using AI. In the case of both iPhone and Galaxy users about two-fifths of those surveyed have tried AI features – 41.6% for iPhone and 46.9% for Galaxy.
So, that’s a majority of users not even bothering with AI in the first place and a general disinterest in AI features from the user base overall, despite both Apple and Samsung making such a big deal out of AI.
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 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
only corporations ever pushed it, customers do not want it or need it.
It actually gets in my way every time it does something so that I have stop what I'm doing to kill it. Would love to be able to uninstall it
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.
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
I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that it’s useless.
I don't think it's meant to be useful....for us, that is. Just another tool to control and brainwash people. I already see a segment of the population trust corporate AI as an authority figure in their lives. Now imagine kids growing up with AI and never knowing a world without. People who have memories of times before the internet is a good way to relate/empathize, at least I think so.
How could it not be this way? Algorithms trained people. They're trained to be fed info from the rich and never seek anything out on their own. I'm not really sure if the corps did it on purpose or not, at least at first. Just money pursuit until powerful realizations were made. I look at the declining quality of Google/Youtube search results. As if they're discouraging seeking out information on your own. Subtly pushing the path of least resistance back to the algorithm or now perhaps a potentially much more sinister "AI" LLM chatbot. Or I'm fucking crazy, you tell me.
Like, we say dead internet. Except...nothing is actually stopping us from ditching corporate internet websites and just go back to smaller privately owned or donation run forums.
Big part of why I'm happy to be here on the newfangled fediverse, even if it hasn't exploded in popularity at least it has like-minded people, or you wouldn't be here.
Check out debate boards. Full of morons using ChatGPT to speak for them and they'll both openly admit it and get mad at you for calling it dehumanizing and disrespectful.
/tinfoil hat
Edit to add more old man yells at clouds(ervers) detail, apologies. Kinda chewing through these complex ideas on the fly.
I don’t see how AI can benefit my phone experience.
I use my phone to make phone calls and for text messaging. Where does AI fit in? It doesn’t.
But imagine!!! What if AI could write your text messages for you and convincingly hold phone calls??? Then you wouldn't have to use your phone to interact with human beings at all!!!
~Why does anyone want this?~
It's all just to get more data from you so it can monetized.
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.
Nothing bores me more than their events that focus on AI.
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.
Not sure if Google Lens counts as AI, but Circle to Search is a cool feature. And on Samsung specifically there is Smart Select that I occasionally use for text extraction, but I suppose it is just OCR.
From Galaxy AI branded features I have tested only Drawing assist which is an image generator. Fooled around for 5 minutes and have not touched it again. I am using Samsung keyboard and I know it has some kind of text generator thing, but have not even bothered myself to try it.
Not sure if Google Lens counts as AI, but Circle to Search is a cool feature.
Not to the point where it's worth having a button for it permanently taking up space at the bottom of the screen.
On a lot of phones you can hide the navigation pill, but Samsung started forcibly showing it when they added Circle to Search. Fortunately I don't have a Samsung phone.
It's cool
Is it useful? Idk
They're kinda like the S-Pen... is it cool? Sure! Do I find myself using it? No, not really.
Certainly counts, Samsung has a few features like grabbing text from images that I found useful.
My problem with them is its all online stuff and I'd like that sort of thing to be processed on device but thats just me.
I think folks often are thinking AI is only the crappy image generation or chat bots they get shoved to. AI is used in a lot of different things, only difference is that those implementations like drawing assist or that text grabbing feature are actually useful and are well done.
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.
That's useful AI that doesn't take billions of dollars to train, though. (it's also a great idea and I'd be down for it)
You mean paying money to people to actually program. In fair exchange for their labor and expertise, instead of stealing it from the internet? What are you, a socialist?
/s
Unless it can be a legit personal assistant, I’m not actually interested. Companies hyped AI way too much.
seems like they hype to themselves more than the customers, they tried to force feed.
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.
99.999% accurate would be pretty useful. Theres plenty of misinformation without AI. Nothing and nobody will be perfect.
Trouble is they range from 0-95% accurate depending on the topic and given context while being very confident when they’re wrong.
I think it largely depends on what kind of AI we're talking about. iOS has had models that let you extract subjects from images for a while now, and that's pretty nifty. Affinity Photo recently got the same feature. Noise cancellation can also be quite useful.
As for LLMs? Fuck off, honestly. My company apparently pays for MS CoPilot, something I only discovered when the garbage popped up the other day. I wrote a few random sentences for it to fix, and the only thing it managed to consistently do was screw the entire text up. Maybe it doesn't handle Swedish? I don't know.
One of the examples I sent to a friend is as follows, but in Swedish;
Microsoft CoPilot is an incredibly poor product. It has a tendency to make up entirely new, nonsensical words, as well as completely mangle the grammar. I really don't understand why we pay for this. It's very disappointing.
And CoPilot was like "yeah, let me fix this for you!"
Microsoft CoPilot is a comedy show without a manuscript. It makes up new nonsense words as though were a word-juggler on circus, and the grammar becomes mang like a bulldzer over a lawn. Why do we pay for this? It is buy a ticket to a show where actosorgets their lines. Entredibly disappointing.
Most AIs struggle with languages other than English, unfortunately, I hate how it reinforces the "defaultness" of English
We're not talking about an AI running a nuclear reactor, this article is about AI assistants on a personal phone. 0.001% failure rates for apps on your phone isn't that insane, and generally the only consequence of those failures would be you need to try a slightly different query. Tools like Alexa or Siri mishear user commands probably more than 0.001% of the time, and yet those tools have absolutely caught on for a significant amount of people.
The issue is that the failure rate of AI is high enough that you have to vet the outputs which typically requires about as much work as doing whatever you wanted the AI to do yourself, and using AI for creative things like art or videos is a fun novelty, but isn't something that you're doing regularly and so your phone trying to promote apps that you only want to use once in a blue moon is annoying. If AI were actually so useful you could query it with anything and 99.999% of the time get back exactly what you wanted, AI would absolutely become much more useful.
People love to make these claims.
Nothing is "100% accurate" to begin with. Humans spew constant FUD and outright malicious misinformation. Just do some googling for anything medical, for example.
So either we acknowledge that everything is already "sewage" and this changes nothing or we acknowledge that people already can find value from searching for answers to questions and they just need to apply critical thought toward whether I_Fucked_your_mom_416 on gamefaqs is a valid source or not.
Which gets to my big issue with most of the "AI Assistant" features. They don't source their information. I am all for not needing to remember the magic incantations to restrict my searches to a single site or use boolean operators when I can instead "ask jeeves" as it were. But I still want the citation of where information was pulled from so I can at least skim it.
For real. If a human performs task X with 80% accuracy, an AI needs to perform the same task with 80.1% accuracy to be a better choice - not 100%. Furthermore, we should consider how much time it would take for a human to perform the task versus an AI. That difference can justify the loss of accuracy. It all depends on the problem you're trying to solve. With that said, it feels like AI in mobile devices hardly solves any problems.
99.999% would be fantastic.
90% is not good enough to be a primary feature that discourages inspection (like a naive chatbot).
What we have now is like...I dunno, anywhere from <1% to maybe 80% depending on your use case and definition of accuracy, I guess?
I haven't used Samsung's stuff specifically. Some web search engines do cite their sources, and I find that to be a nice little time-saver. With the prevalence of SEO spam, most results have like one meaningful sentence buried in 10 paragraphs of nonsense. When the AI can effectively extract that tiny morsel of information, it's great.
Ideally, I don't ever want to hear an AI's opinion, and I don't ever want information that's baked into the model from training. I want it to process text with an awareness of complex grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. That's what LLMs are actually good at.
I think you nailed it. In the grand scheme of things, critical thinking is always required.
The problem is that, when it comes to LLMs, people seem to use magical thinking instead. I'm not an artist, so I oohd and aahd at some of the AI art I got to see, especially in the early days, when we weren't flooded with all this AI slop. But when I saw the coding shit it spewed? Thanks, I'll pass.
The only legit use of AI in my field that I know of is an unit test generator, where tests were measured for stability and code coverage increase before being submitted to dev approval. But actual non-trivial production grade code? Hell no.
Perplexity is kinda half-decent with showing its sources, and I do rely on it a lot to get me 50% of the way there, at which point I jump into the suggested sources, do some of my own thinking, and do the other 50% myself.
It's been pretty useful to me so far.
I've realised I don't want complete answers to anything really. Give me a roundabout gist or template, and then tell me where to look for more if I'm interested.
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.
I love the AI features for photos of my galaxy, but other than that I don't use it
AI was never meant for the average person but the average person had to be convinced it was for funding.
Anyone who has been paying attention has been waiting for this enormous bag of shit to explode already.
AI is useless and I block it anyway I can.
"Stop trying to make
fetchAI happen. It's not going to happen."AI is worse that adding no value, it is an actual detriment.
I feel like I'm in those years of You really want a 3d TV, right? Right? 3D is what you've been waiting for, right? all over again, but with a different technology.
It will be VR's turn again next.
I admit I'm really rooting for affordable, real-world, daily-use AR though.
Honestly I can't say I've ever had a reason to use it on my phone.
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.
dint MS said their AI isnt as profitable, google is sure hellbent on going with AI.
They just need to capitalize the surveillance capabilities. Find a way to convince users they need access to everything on their phones in order to sell them first class convenience. Once you've done that there's plenty of money to be made.
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.
You are thinking about Smart Select? I just take fullscreen screenshot and then crop it if I need part of it. Did it even when I had previous Smart Select version. Overall I think new version with all previous 4 select options bundled in 1 is better.
"useless" is a more positive impression than I have.
A damning result for AI pump and dump scammers.
every NVDA earnings call lol. Old man Jenson had a (chip) farm, AI AI OH! guy literally said AI almost 100 times in a call.
Sounds like corporate right now. Had a meeting earlier and it wasn't even focused on AI, but I heard it enough times to make my ears bleed.
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.
In my office there's one prototype model under testing that nobody uses and does nothing useful. Anything else is actually banned, we handled way too sensitive information. It causes office and outlook to glitch often when it tries to open copilot and get immediately slapped silly to shut up. The blinking blank windows are annoying though. IT had to make an special communication to all staff explaining that it was normal behavior.
The first thing I do with a new phone is turn off any kind of assistance.
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?
I use chatgpt for things like debugging error codes but I have to be explicit with as much detail as possible or it will give me all sorts of inapplicable crap
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.
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.
AI SLOP!
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.
Downvoted for casual use of a slur.
If you're talking about retard, what would you prefer i use and how long until that word becomes a slur? You know it wasn't long ago retard was the polite term, and mongoloid before that. It doesn't matter what word you use, if the meaning has negative connotations, some asshole like you decides to take their turn at policing speech to the benifit of nobody.
In any case, I think you're you're wasting your time.
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.
The fact that I can't trust the AI message to be remotely factual makes that sort of use case pointless to me. If I grep and sift through docs, I'll have better comprehension of what I'm trying to figure out. With AI slop, I just end up having to hunt for what it messed up, without any context, wasting my time and patience.
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.
Artificial Incompetence
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.
Can it generate weird porn locally?
You can do that all by yourself, no AI needed!
Count me in!
I hate it 🤷 I keep it turned off anywhere that I can.
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 was excited to see what it could do on my iPhones but so far I have not liked anything. The notification summaries are useless, for instance.
I do wonder if AI is being used in the background in ways I don’t see, but I doubt it.
If it is you probably wouldn't be thrilled to find out how.
I need AI summaries a lot less than I would prefer a smart mail filter to actually remove all the spam email and texts.
Outside of some education and medical scenarios, I have yet to hear of any truly useful AI.
even for the above it isnt useful, at least For professors have been abusing because they are too lazy to check someones writing, and found the AI have mistakenly assuming the paper is been written by AI. Medical would be just as problematic, it would be wierd if they are using it to make a diagnostic, without discerning, ruling other diseases with similar symptoms or results.
hurry up and get Siri integrated with chatGPT and it'll be a lot more useful.
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.
Id take Bixby back over this forced AI crap.
I mean I wouldn't but you know....