>you could have GPT vision interpret it and offer you recipes or what is missing
What is missing and what I should buy are different things. If my fridge has yogurt, bacon and some hamburgers, you might say "well, you are missing eggs". Except maybe I don't want eggs. I may be even allergic. Or maybe I like eggs but I'm in some low-protein diet for whatever reason.
The goal of a fridge is not to have literally everything, is to store everything you think you need for some days.
As for recipes, yes, that's more creative, but I guess I would just actively Google that (or even use an old fashioned recipe book!) if I were looking for original recipes. Of course, you can also ChatGPT it, but the direct fridge -> ChatGPT interaction is a bit weird because maybe I don't want original recipes or maybe I'm going to eat out.
So a hypothetical (?) app that sends me notifications about what recipes ChatGPT suggests by looking at my fridge wouldn't be very appealing unless you're always looking for new recipes. If you're mostly cooking ordinary things, continuous "You could cook X" would count as spam, much like a lot of people skip (or try to skip) ads on Youtube and ignore random "buy this at 70% discount" emails. And if you're that passionate about new recipes I guess you're probably interested in cooking and don't need the fridge to tell you what's missing.
This is why we can't have nice things. Any new technology is instantly leveraged to shove ads down people's throats and get them to buy more things they don't need.
I think that if the manufacturer is going to continue using the appliance for their own business purposes, they shouldn't be permitted to describe the transaction that causes you to possess it as a "sale", because you don't own it free and clear.
I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work. Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view.
If it's a huge problem psychologically for you, maybe you can just take the following 5 years or whatever time you estimate you will be using the product and calculate that into the base price to make your decision.
>I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning
Adding advertising into the mix almost always makes the incentives align more poorly with the customer's interest. For example, the refrigerator manufacturer now has an incentive to increase food spoilage to increase ad conversions.
>Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view
So you want to pay them to show you ads in the hopes that that means they don't stop supporting your refrigerator? What does that even mean? They're not going to extend your warranty.
> I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work.
Think of it like working conditions getting increasingly poor and abusive year over year, while your salary stays fixed.
It matters not because the deals are increasingly shit and abusive, but also because them being much better is within most of our's living memories, and there's no actual reason for things to go this shit, except a supplier-driven market fucking customers over because they can, and race-to-the-bottom mechanics preventing any single vendor from reversing course.
I didn't say increasing prices. I said decreasing quality. Price can stay fixed or even go down.
And yes, there's plenty of wrong with the free market, starting with that it's a hypothetical construct that doesn't exist, and even if it did, it's gameable and would have been gamed by the vendors the same way the real market is.
I mean more interactive way, not notifications being sent.
E.g. you start interaction by asking the fridge - I am a bit tired, what is an easy thing to cook based on what I have in the fridge and I am stopping by the store, is there anything I should buy to have a few more options.
So GPT vision takes image of what is in the fridge and then tries to solve for that question. If user is allergic to something that would be in GPT's prompt.
You may be at work, and store is on the way to work. Also what you described is quite many steps, and the images have to be taken at certain angles to capture everything.
It would be directly connected to GPT and you can either use it as mobile app or with other devices or fridge itself directly.
So for example you are at work, about to leave home, store is on the way and then you ask this question from the app. Fridge takes photo, forwards it with certain prompts to OpenAI APIs and then gives you the response.
So you're saying a fridge takes a photo (of itself, essentially... a selfie?), forwards it with certain prompts to a GPT and then gives you the response. But as I said earlier I might not like certain foods, or I may actively avoid certain foods for medical or religious reasons.
Now, if this was an explicit user-GPT interaction, you could prompt the GPT with "hey, I'm Muslim, what can I cook with this stuff?" or "hey, I'm lactose intolerant, what else could I buy?". You do need to trust the OpenAI provider, but not the fridge.
Instead, the fridge automatically talks to GPT. So if you want to avoid "dumb" suggestions you wouldn't be able to follow, you would have to tell your fridge you're Jew or Muslim or lactose intolerant or diabetic. Don't you see an issue with this?
I'm not "tinfoil hat" paranoid, I don't think people are out there to get me. But a certain dose of skepticism when it comes to data usage should be healthy, especially when many companies have been known to mess up this aspect (from Cambridge Analytica to Roomba employers sending pictures of a woman on the toilet to Facebook, and much more). You cannot avoid this 100% unless you go to extreme lengths, but if you can avoid sending data to one more company, why not?
In fridge it takes images from different angles, and different floors to make sure it is possible to identify all the items that exist in that fridge.
If you don't like certain foods, you can just customise the prompt that fridge sends to OpenAI. You can customise it through a web app or mobile app.
> you would have to tell your fridge you're Jew or Muslim or lactose intolerant or diabetic. Don't you see an issue with this?
What's the problem with storing your food preferences somewhere? People use dieting apps all the time on mobile.
> You cannot avoid this 100% unless you go to extreme lengths, but if you can avoid sending data to one more company, why not?
You are already sending your data in thousands of different ways and exposing yourself at any moment.
I'm not saying you should do more of it, but food preferences seems like a very minor drop in the bucket of all that you are already exposing.
Most people store their images in a cloud, which already indicate amazing amount about them. Just using a smartphone is 1000x worse than having food preferences stored somewhere.
Sure but it's something more for barely any actual advantage.
I accept that when I Google something Google and maybe other companies know what I searched, because Googling things is useful. I cannot bring an encyclopaedia and a detailed map of the whole world with me all the time, so it's a tradeoff I can accept.
I accept that, on the rare occasions I turn geolocation, someone will know where I am, because if I do turn it on, it's probably because I got lost. Then I turn it off and off we go.
Divulging food preferences for... an AI that suggests me what I should buy doesn't look like it's worth it. And it's not just food preferences. Remember people store medications in their fridge. A fridge so advanced it can recognize any food is probably capable of reading labels and knowing I bought medication for X,Y and Z. Which is definitely something I'm not explicitly telling people (or things) without a reason.
And don't forget the power of correlating data. Correlating food preferences with other data you could easily understand if someone is ill, pregnant, whether they follow a certain religion (think Ramadan, or not eating meat on Friday,...), whether they are living with someone else (buying twice the amount of stuff they usually buy?) and so on.
This is all stuff I try to avoid telling everyone. Yes, my doctor could be hacked and people could know I'm on medication anyway (hypothetically), but why divulge that voluntarily for essentially no reason?
Honestly you are just describing to me more exciting features. The correlations with potential illnesses, etc. Have all of your data piped into single location to use AI to improve your health.
you’re continuing to look at everything from a perspective of an altruistic product to consumer relationship and not the reality the other commenter is trying to describe.
yes it’s an “exciting feature” if your AI fridge can know that you’re pregnant and not recommend recipes that contain certain ingredients. what the other person is alluding to is that the data it has about you specifically will not stay contained between you and your fridge. what if you’re not married and your employer is like dave ramsey and fires women for being pregnant out of wedlock? or you live in a state with much more grim conditions currently around women and miscarriages? what if the meds in your fridge are related to HRT and there are orgs actively buying data to find these people to target them for bullying online (or worse)?
all of your data will inevitably end up in the hands of people that aren’t at all interested in improving your health. they’re interested in extracting value from you and your data or they have ill will towards you.
what starts as “exciting features” leads to your fridge tracking what groceries you purchase and what you consume. then it (or a third party that gets this data) makes determinations about your religion, your lifestyle, if you’re pregnant or not, etc without you knowing.
when every device in your house is collecting and selling off your data as a business model, there’s a significant mental overhead that needs to be expelled to ensure that you are able to keep your life private if you choose to. you may say: “don’t buy the appliances with the feature, then!” once a company can integrate these features effectively and subsidize hardware costs by selling the data, they’ll have other companies competing to offer the same so they can hit those target features and prices. eventually the market is flooded with appliances with these “exciting features” that are just gathering and selling data. in the end, we’ve traded our option to _choose_ privacy for a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. personally, i don’t believe the public is currently aware enough to understand the consequences.
I should be able to decide that I don't care about this type of privacy. Sure there are people out there that could be harmed by this. I don't believe in the argument that you can't have a market with both ways, one where you can't opt in and other where you can. I should be able to choose to give my medical data to companies if there are ways to improve my lifestyle and quality from that. And to me that is exciting. I have been lucky to be born in a place where religion and other things like that don't matter. I see a lot of problems and ways life could be optimised. I notice daily how I spend so much time constantly on things that could just be automated away. And it is horrible knowing I am spending so much time on that.
We live in this World for a very limited time. If things can be automated, they should so we can choose exactly what we want to do with this time.
> I don't believe in the argument that you can't have a market with both ways, one where you can't opt in and other where you can.
the problem is that “the market” doesn’t care what you believe in or what you “opt out” of.
there are devices that have programmed in alternate ways to phone home even if you choose to intentionally not connect it to wifi.
> If things can be automated, they should so we can choose exactly what we want to do with this time.
there’s very likely a CSA in your area that you can pay to deliver you fresh meats, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. some also provide recipes alongside.
it’s a much simpler solution in lieu of shoehorning tech into an appliance that will likely stop receiving bug fixes or security updates in 3-5 years when the company releases a new version.
like most of the tech industry, this is a “solution” looking for a problem.
The thing about data, unlike many common objects (ignoring 3d printers), is that you can easily copy data you control. So the fact that the fridge tells you "as an additional comfort in your pregnancy, I would add X" (if it even says that clearly) does not mean it also don't send data to other people.
Again, this is not a science fiction example. Many companies have successfully sent personal data to other companies or leaked that somehow to the Internet.
Personally this still makes me uncomfortable, even if I know this cannot be 100% avoided in today's world. So if I can avoid volunteering additional data to some company in exchange for voice activated lights, I'm happier. Maybe it's just me, though... but probably not.
What is missing and what I should buy are different things. If my fridge has yogurt, bacon and some hamburgers, you might say "well, you are missing eggs". Except maybe I don't want eggs. I may be even allergic. Or maybe I like eggs but I'm in some low-protein diet for whatever reason.
The goal of a fridge is not to have literally everything, is to store everything you think you need for some days.
As for recipes, yes, that's more creative, but I guess I would just actively Google that (or even use an old fashioned recipe book!) if I were looking for original recipes. Of course, you can also ChatGPT it, but the direct fridge -> ChatGPT interaction is a bit weird because maybe I don't want original recipes or maybe I'm going to eat out.
So a hypothetical (?) app that sends me notifications about what recipes ChatGPT suggests by looking at my fridge wouldn't be very appealing unless you're always looking for new recipes. If you're mostly cooking ordinary things, continuous "You could cook X" would count as spam, much like a lot of people skip (or try to skip) ads on Youtube and ignore random "buy this at 70% discount" emails. And if you're that passionate about new recipes I guess you're probably interested in cooking and don't need the fridge to tell you what's missing.