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It's not even that certain sub-industries prefer "AI", it's the umbrella term a company can use in Marketing for virtually any automated process that provides a seemingly subjective result.

Case in point:

For a decade the implementation of cameras went through development, testing and tuning of Auto Exposure, Auto Focus and Auto White-Balance ("AAA") engines as well as image post-processing.

These engines ran on a Image Signal Processor (ISP) or sometimes on the Camera sensor itself, extensive work was done by Engineering Teams on building these models in order to optimize them to run on low-latency on an ISP.

Suddenly AI came along and all of these features became "AI features". One company started with "AI assisted Camera" to promote the process everyone was doing all-along. So all had to introduce AI, without any disruptive change in the process.



I remember somethings similar when the term "cloud" came up. It is still someone else's server or datacenter with tooling.


Yeah, can they just stop coining terms to refer to old, pre-existing things? I still hate the term "cloud".


My favorite description is “The cloud is a computer you don’t own in Reston, VA”


> One company started with "AI assisted Camera" to promote the process everyone was doing all-along.

Before the "AI" labeling more advanced image processing was often called "computational photography". At least in the world of smartphone cameras. Because they have tiny image sensors and lenses smartphone cameras need to do a lot of work to get a decent image out of any environment that doesn't have perfect lighting. The processing is more traditional computer vision.

There's not legitimate generative AI features being peddled like editing people out of (or into) photos. But most of the image processing pipelines haven't fundamentally changed but not have AI labeling to please marketers and upper management.


I agree it's completely meaningless. At this point I think marketing would label a toilet fill valve as "AI".


Well the "smart toilet" is definitely a thing you can buy today:

> The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) in bathroom fixtures, particularly toilets, is shaping the future of hygiene, convenience, and sustainability.


While automated AI measurement of the chemical makeup of .. human effluent could be helpful for tracking health trends, I fear it’d also come with built in integrations for Instagram and TikTok.


Good news! The integration will be used to customize your feed by recommending foods and medicine that you might enjoy.

The future is allowing advertisers to bid on specific proteins and triglyceride chains detected by the smart toilet.


or (and i can actually see this happening) an Amazon integration to reorder bathroom tissue and bowl cleaner





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