phone ai

[Frank Cox]

So I got a new cell phone last week. Samsung S25+, which is apparently all kinds of advanced over my previous S22.

Anyway, I got to playing with the ai stuff on it earlier tonight, and I'm rather impressed.

Using the google bar app I pointed my phone at Chip in his cage and thought it would tell me something like "this is a bird in a cage". Nope, nothing that generic. "This is a budgie, a species of bird commonly kept as a pet" and so on for several pages with all kinds of information about budgies.

So I tried it with one of the movie posters on the wall in my lobby. It said, "This is a movie poster. The title of the movie is Materialists and here is a list of the stars and here is the release date and here is a write-up on what it's about." So I said, "when is it playing in Melville" and it told me that it's playing at the Melville Theatre in a couple of weeks and gave me the dates and the showtimes.

Wow. I guess you really don't need to know anything any more; just ask your phone.

I've never really done anything with ai before now other than taking a brief look at chatgpt when it was first announced as a big hairy deal. I thought that it looks neat but I still can't figure out what I would ever want to use it for.

Maybe now I'll find uses for ai on my phone, if I remember that I have it available I suppose and if I have a question to ask.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I have always found that what they mean by advanced, is that they screwed up the user interface even more than on the last model, also probably added more AI crap. This also seems to go for any major brand of phone you buy. I kept my last phone as a backup because it was still like new after three years, and I still get a new sim card with every new phone, so I can revert to that if necessary. Now with this new phone that they can load the sim data directly in to the phone itself. Makes me wonder what other wasteful tricks they have up their sleeves for the next 5 years??.

[Ryan Gallagher]

I like my AI kept in cages like your budgie. I don’t mind an app or assistant integration, but I prefer to know when I’m getting an AI output. I dislike the AI creep into everything, and non obvious lines of separation.

Top of page google responses are almost all AI responses now too, esp if you structure your search as a question. God knows how many news stories paired imagery is all AI now, it certainly is with the less traditional news sites and blog formats just as click bait.

[Leo Enticknap]

The camera app on the iPhone also has an "identify a plant or animal" feature, which I've had a lot of fun with. It's also been significantly useful, for example in identifying specific types of weed in the yard (not the sort that one smokes, I hasten to add), which enables me to research the best ways of getting rid of them.

However, it's not foolproof. It can't make up its mind whether one of our cats is a Maine Coon or a Norwegian Forest Cat, and changes its mind from photo to photo.

I don't think this is an example of full scale AI, though. I suspect that it simply compares the photo you take to ones in its database, to find the closest matches.

[Ryan Gallagher]

The camera app on the iPhone also has an "identify a plant or animal" feature, which I've had a lot of fun with. It's also been significantly useful, for example in identifying specific types of weed in the yard (not the sort that one smokes, I hasten to add), which enables me to research the best ways of getting rid of them.

However, it's not foolproof. It can't make up its mind whether one of our cats is a Maine Coon or a Norwegian Forest Cat, and changes its mind from photo to photo.

I don't think this is an example of full scale AI, though. I suspect that it simply compares the photo you take to ones in its database, to find the closest matches.

Yeah long before the AI hype there have been expert system apps for plant identification too. There is even a font identifying one that is super useful ("What The Font") for eons now.

[Jim Cassedy]

I can look at a bird in a cage or a movie poster, and recognize them without A-I, if
you'll pardon my attempt at sarcasm. I remember when desktop calculators became
a common item. I remember catching myself more than once, reaching for one
when all I needed was a simple computation that I realized I could perfectly well
in my head. I'm a technology-geek, probably like many of you are too. But I
also try to use technology in a way that makes me smarter, not dumber, if
you know what i"m trying to say.

> I also upgraded to a newer model phone about two weeks ago, and have
pretty much got it configured the way I want it, but geez, I don't recall my
last new "upgrade" coming with so many pop-up nudges suggesting apps
or items I don't want or need. I'm with the same carrier, and have the phone
loaded with most of the same apps I had on my old one, but I don't recall
getting so many useless pop-ups and suggestions at any other time in
the past when I got a new phone.

[Leo Enticknap]

Couldn't agree more. Reminds me of the time my son started a 3-D printing project going, and the machine told him that the job would take 308 minutes. He asked me how many hours that was. "What is 300 divided by 60?" I replied. His response was to start searching the room for a phone, calculator, or computer that would tell him the answer. I didn't let him off the hook that easily, and after some encouragement and nudging, he figured it out in his head. When I pointed out that this was quicker and easier than finding a gadget and then asking it the question, I'm not sure that he was totally convinced, but hopefully the point I was trying to make registered.

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't mind AI tools helping people with little mundane tasks. What I don't like is how the technology is being used at helping people cheat their way through something or, ultimately, just replace human workers with AI-based bots. In an Axios interview this week Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned AI could wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs and push the nation's unemployment rate to 10%-20% levels in the next one to five years. The technology race in AI is only accelerating. As the advancements keep stacking up many businesses won't be able to resist the lure of replacing humans with bots to boost profit margins. Software coders, paralegals and many other job categories will probably be affected.

In the graphics field AI can do some tasks pretty well but fail at others. Still, there are scores of people trying to use Adobe Illustrator's text to vector AI prompt to instantly generate stock art libraries to resell. They'll vent in the Adobe Community Forums, bitching about problems they're running into. Maybe if they actually created the graphics themselves using the normal tool sets the end results might look correct. But that takes time, effort and talent. Stock image sites (Adobe Stock, iStock, Getty, etc) are getting flooded with faked AI-generated imagery submissions. The tide of fake images is diluting the value of real photography and real illustration.

So many people are using existing AI-based tech as part of a hustle. With that in mind, I worry Dario Amodei's predictions of mass job losses could be accurate. There are no morals in big business. And this race with AI isn't going to stop until they've arrived at computers with Artificial General Intelligence.

Yeah long before the AI hype there have been expert system apps for plant identification too. There is even a font identifying one that is super useful ("What The Font") for eons now.

The "What the Font" tool at the MyFonts web site isn't as good as it was in the past. It always limited its results to fonts available for sale at the site. The problem is once Monotype bought that web site and several other online fonts stores a slew of independent type designers and type foundries pulled their fonts out of that store. Over the past 20 or so years Monotype has acquired a lot of type companies and their type libraries. Monotype has its own font subscription service; it has priced many commercial type families at high levels to steer people into the font subscription service rather than buying font licenses outright. Before Monotype bought the MyFonts web store it was common to see new type families introduced with discounts up to 90% off. Those days are over.

[Ryan Gallagher]

The "What the Font" tool at the MyFonts web site isn't as good as it was in the past. It always limited its results to fonts available for sale at the site. The problem is once Monotype bought that web site and several other online fonts stores a slew of independent type designers and type foundries pulled their fonts out of that store. Over the past 20 or so years Monotype has acquired a lot of type companies and their type libraries. Monotype has its own font subscription service; it has priced many commercial type families at high levels to steer people into the font subscription service rather than buying font licenses outright. Before Monotype bought the MyFonts web store it was common to see new type families introduced with discounts up to 90% off. Those days are over.

Yeah I used it recently only to realize a lot had changed since I fell in love with it, thanks for the evolution story.

If I had a modern iPhone I’d see if it’s camera recognition app was less encumbered, I just wanna know what font it is, not the most similar one I can buy via the ID tool.

[Bobby Henderson]

Sometimes I have decent luck using the Font Identifier tool (or "matcherator") at the Font Squirrel web site. That tool brings up results between fonts that are available for free or for sale commercially.
https://www.fontsquirrel.com/matcherator

If you use Adobe applications they have a couple of font ID tools. The Adobe Fonts web site has a visual search tool. The Retype tool in Adobe Illustrator can ID fonts in either placed pixel-based images or raw vector-based letter shapes.

The drawback with any of these font ID tools is they work from a limited database of fonts. They don't compare type samples against all fonts ever made. Considering the legal hurdles I don't think it's possible for anyone to create a font ID tool that could do such a thing.

[Frank Cox]

It's my understanding that the shape of the letters in a font are not a copyrightable thing. Just the name and the specific bits that make up the instructions to draw it. So a database containing the shapes of every font cross-referenced to the names of those fonts would not be illegal.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Sometimes I have decent luck using the Font Identifier tool (or "matcherator") at the Font Squirrel web site. That tool brings up results between fonts that are available for free or for sale commercially.
https://www.fontsquirrel.com/matcherator

If you use Adobe applications they have a couple of font ID tools. The Adobe Fonts web site has a visual search tool. The Retype tool in Adobe Illustrator can ID fonts in either placed pixel-based images or raw vector-based letter shapes.

The drawback with any of these font ID tools is they work from a limited database of fonts. They don't compare type samples against all fonts ever made. Considering the legal hurdles I don't think it's possible for anyone to create a font ID tool that could do such a thing.

Except when AI companies scrape the entire internet to train a model I suppose. It's the wild west out there as far as copyright is concerned relative to training data.

[Bobby Henderson]

It's my understanding that the shape of the letters in a font are not a copyrightable thing. Just the name and the specific bits that make up the instructions to draw it. So a database containing the shapes of every font cross-referenced to the names of those fonts would not be illegal.

The situation isn't quite that simple. The shape of a letter can't be copyrighted. However, the data in font files most definitely can be copyrighted. The names of fonts can also be copyrighted or even registered as trademarks.

If someone took a copy of the Helvetica Neue Std font file and merely renamed it and tried to re-sell it under a different name they would dragged into court very quickly. Back in the 1990's a company called Key Fonts tried to rename and resell a bunch of Adobe fonts and got sued over it.

Due to this situation there are many "flavors" of the same typeface. They look identical at first glance, but they are not. The Futura typeface has been made by at least a dozen or more different type foundries. I can type a few letters in Futura Std (Linotype), Futura BT (Bitstream), Futura PT (Paratype), Futura ND (Newfville Digital), URW Futura or Futura Now (Monotype) and then line all the copies on top of each other. None of them line up exactly. They're all slightly different. Legally each foundry had to digitize their own interpretations of the glyphs from scratch, create their own spacing tables, hinting, etc.

This isn't a big deal if someone is just creating graphics for print or web use. It's a giant pain in the ass for sign making. If a hail storm bashes out the faces of a channel letter building sign and it's something our company didn't make then we're going to face tough problems without the original design files. We can't just guess what fonts were used and throw it together in the computer. The design probably won't match the existing sign. I might think they set the letters in Helvetica Neue when they might have actually used a copycat like Swiss 721 or Nimbus Sans. The copycats are not pattern accurate to the original. This doesn't even get into the situation of graphic design malpractice where "designers" artificially squeeze and stretch letters out of their normal proportions. Variable Fonts that have weight and width axes provide a more graceful solution around that, but the same problem remains; there are millions of possible instances in a variable font that has 2 or more axes. In the end, our guys are often stuck having to manually draw patterns from the aluminum returns and manually cut replacement letter faces by hand.

I think a site like Font Squirrel can get away with providing font matching results for many free and commercially sold fonts since the site concentrates on redistributing legally free fonts. However, there is a bandwidth burden for however many fonts they'll cover in their search queries. They might expect to get paid by type foundries by way of advertising buys or straight deals in order to include a foundry's type library in their font ID engine.

[Frank Cox]

But if it's just the shape you're interested in, then whether the font is named Times New Roman or Jack's Fancy Font is irrelevant as long as it looks the same.

This seems to me to be a problem with a solution similar to that used by hardware store here when they sell paint. If you want to match an existing colour you just scan that color into their computer program and it prints out the recipe for mixing paint of that colour. Doesn't matter what it's called as long as it looks the same on the wall.