The touchscreen is cheaper to install than buttons and knobs, and they’re trying to come up with reasons that a cheaper, worse product is actually good and you should thank them for their innovation.

My air fryer (just a small countertop convection oven big enough for a whole chicken and sides) has a meat probe attachment that turns off the device when the internal temp reaches the desired doneness, and that requires telling it what kind of meat you have, but thats all. It doesnt need to know anything else, including whether or not you have sides, that’s what the guide tables in the booklet are for.

I assume this ai thing just does the same thing internally, and probably doesn’t even have ai or advanced logic at all. You plug in the food and it references the guide table itself internally. Saving you exactly zero time because plugging in the food is more work than looking at a reference table.

I dunno when this Brazilian microwave oven I have was manufactured, but it’s very old by now. While it doesn’t have any “smart” features (let alone “AI”), it does have dedicated buttons for specific dishes (beef, chicken, fish, veggies, rice, etc). Some meals require different patterns of cooking (e.g. full blast for few minutes, followed by low intensity for the remaining time in order for the dish not to end up burnt). The more options of dishes available, the more this functionality becomes part of the sales pitch.

So, it’s far from a novelty, and to be fair, having the oven/microwave/etc to “know” the dish could lead to more precise cooking… But it doesn’t need to ship with a spying operating system with internet connection, ads, telemetry, terms and conditions, software updates and a “you’re absolutely right, I mistook your margherita pizza for a frozen lamb and it ended up burnt. Do you want to learn more about the nutritional benefits of burnt pizzas, the Italian culture of pineapple-covered Bruciato, or do you want to stick a cheese to it using the surely-nontoxic 3M® Scotch SuperGlue? Let me know if you want to proceed with the US$ 2999.99 purchase (half soccer ball equivalent weight of pineapple and a pack of three SuperGlue) from our 1,048,576 partners using your MasterCard ending with 9999 and CVV number 909”.

!fuck_ai@lemmy.world

Ill bet there is a subscription for all those “features” that bricks it if you dont pay them monthly after buying it for $5k

I remember in Star Trek Voyager, Capt Janeway is a terrible cook when she’s using a replicator. I thought that it was absurd that someone of her age couldn’t cook. Now, I imagine products like this are the cause of that.

80 years ago most people knew how to butcher and clean their food.

60 years ago people knew how to cook a roast to perfection.

40 years ago people could cook an entire dinner in a microwave.

20 years ago people could have entire dinners frozen and prepared delivered to their door.

today, people couldn’t tell you what kind of cut of meat they’re being served, or how it was cooked, or what the ingredients are. but, they can tell you all the marketing bullshit on the box it was delivered in.

ok, so the years aren’t 100% spot on, but you get the point. as we become more dependent on technology, we lose more abilities to care for ourselves.

ask someone, “how do you start a fire?” I’m willing yo bet their answer depends on technology invented in the last 100 years.

I’ve seen new ones with TVs to stream what’s inside. In some way that is neat, but, really, you really suck at cooking if you can’t learn to manage an oven. It’s better and safer to just learn.

it’s so they know what to advertise to you

It’s probably not using any AI in any modern sense of the word, it’s just there for marketing purposes. What I’m guessing it really is, is more fancy sensors (temperature sensors in more locations, infrared sensors, moisture sensors), and multiple heating elements and/or fans that can be individually turned on and off, connected to a more complicated PID controller that is adjusted based on the selected dish. So it can do things like detect that the rear is hotter than the front and turn off the rear heating element, or detect if too much moisture is being released and turn down the temperature, but it’s ultimately the same kind of technology as any oven with a temperature knob uses.

I rarely use my oven for anything other than pizza, bread and cookies, so it’s probably not very useful to me, but maybe it’s convenient if you do things like cooking a whole turkey or something?

Navigating through the extensive settings menu is beautifully simple with the new touch screen user interface.

I am sorry, a fucking settings menu on an oven is a primary sales argument?

Lol fuck that. A touchscreen certainly isn’t a selling feature on a device I expect to be reliable. And why would I want a menu of options for a device that normally offers all its settings up-front?

They even brags about internal steak and bread thermometers, we have had those for decades.

And they either break after a few uses or they just don’t read the temperature properly and cause the oven to set the temperature incorrectly.

Well obviously, it has a connection to an app or even a smart speaker, and ofcourse the UI on the oven is a touch UI.

If it doesn’t work without a network connection I don’t want it. An appliance should be dead-simple, standalone, with near-bulletproof electronics and no built-in process decisions that are not clearly surfaced to the user.

Thanks, but no thanks, I’ll keep using my oven with normal knobs…

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It needs to know so it can send your data to whatever company made it, duh. Nothing will go wrong giving ai control over something that can start a fire in your house.

The manufacturers’ reasoning here is presumably that the more technology is built into a device, the faster it becomes obsolete, and the sooner consumers will have to buy new devices.

This is a classic example of consumer-unfriendly design, in which manufacturers ensure that devices have a limited useful life or a purposely frail design. This is called planned obsolescence and can be achieved through both mechanical means and software.

Why does an oven need to connect to an app for the clock to be set?

Ask Samsung

The AI companies are investing into AI startups, and then showing all the sales as “proof” to investors that they’re viable so they can get infusions of cash.

When bubble bursts it will either devistate the world, or force us to rapidly switch to an entirely planned economy.