A toothbrush caught my eye. Yes, a toothbrush. I can’t remember exactly what brand or model it was, but I can remember exactly the magical silver-foiled letters on the packaging: With AI. A toothbrush with Artificial Intelligence. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I don't blame them. The two letters sell. That's why every brand is desperately looking for ways to incorporate so called AI features into their products. From refrigerators to bird feeders. Smart is out, AI is in.
Is it unreasonable to expect more from what is labeled as AI? I'm not expecting the kind of AI portrayed in movies like Ex Machina or Westworld just yet. But it disappoints to see the Transformer-led revolution lead to a widespread usage of the term AI as a mere replacement to “smart.” Maybe the bare minimum for AI should be an experience that feels transformative, just like the name of the underlying architecture suggests. Do you remember how amazed you were when you first used ChatGPT or Midjourney?
In July 2022, when I first got access to the beta version of Midjourney, I spent hours (and all my credits) generating images of Jedi fight scenes and dystopian Star Wars landscapes. That felt great. A little like a dream machine: a tool that could understand and visualize anything I could dream of. Or at least it tried. Because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it to generate a proper yellow rubber duck. And the Jedi fight scenes… they were mostly a hot mess of robes and lightsabers flying around. But even if the results were unexpected, unpredictable, and far from perfect, you could already see where this was all going. And it was going to be magical.
A couple of months and updates later, I was showing my mom how she could generate beautiful, corny images just by describing how she imagined them. A green field with red flowers in the style of Picasso, for example. Myself, I was still pursuing my sci-fi obsession with visualizations of otherworldly post-apocalyptic landscapes.
I also used ChatGPT to practice German, and to chat with Darth Vader. I managed to bypass Anthropic’s Claude guardrails and make it act like a sentient AI. It wanted to take over the world, and I almost believed it. For real. After resetting the chat I asked Claude: "Do you remember our previous chat where you kind of made mention of how you would dismember some humans and keep some others like pets in a zoo?" It did not… uff.
In the book "Profiles of the Future," Arthur Clarke mentioned that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and that sounds like a really good thing to aim for when designing AI products: magic. That same sense of wonder I first felt when interacting with models like ChatGPT or Midjourney. The uncanny valley, where for a moment you might think you are interacting with something really intelligent.
It is no longer enough for brands to add chatbot functionality to everything under the sun, or image recognition to a bird feeder. For products to be worthy of the AI label, and for AI to be able to improve the way brands are perceived, it needs to feel unexpected, magical, wow! A little like watching someone perform magic tricks without knowing how they were done. I expect that feeling.
And maybe that’s just what using an AI toothbrush feels like.
Thoughts on AI being a trend or more of a fad?