3 Absurd Uses of AI

Like any new technology, some companies will try to come up with innovative ... or really stupid, uses of AI.

Photo by Surface on Unsplash

There's been a lot happening in Vida de Andy of late, so I haven't had much time to write as I would have liked. I found out earlier this week that I was being laid off. I had been expecting that it was coming for about the last 2 weeks or so, but even with that knowledge, it still hit me like a sucker punch I wasn't expecting. 

But, not to worry. I have a few options in the pipeline, and I'm sure I'll be back up and gainfully employed in no time. 

All of that is to say that I thought I would take a light-hearted approach this week. I wanted to find some of the absurd uses of AI out there. And fam, the interwebs did not disappoint. 

A guess of a guess is somehow less of a guess? 

With a name like Parabon Nanolabs, you know that whatever their product is going to high on hype, low on caring about consequences. Parabon Nanolabs is a company that uses your DNA to make a guess at what your face looks like. This isn't a new use of AI and machine learning, but that doesn't make it any less facepalm-worthy. The Wired article talks about a case from 2017 where police used a face generated using Parabon Nanolab's software, and then later ran that ML-generated face through face recognition software. And thought was all totally fine. 

Why is this absurd? 

We can't even conclusively predict eye color using DNA. Yet, this company has the audacity to say it can recreate an entire face? Bruh, really? Even worse, the police then took the ML-generated face and ran it through ML-facial recognition models because what your ML really needs is more ML. It's like ML-inception. Can imagine someone being arrested because some random company created an image that looked like you using the proprietary ML model that they super duper pinky swear is tots accurate, and then police ran this fake image against the already finicky facial recognition models? 

I need AI to help me walk

Who thought my roller skates needed AI? Apparently, Moonwalkers did. They slapped some AI into a pair of roller skates completed with a $1,400 price tag to boot to solve the problem with people ... walking I guess? I fail to see the problem this is solving other than, "How can we make the most absurdly expensive roller skate on the market while also capitalizing on the AI marketing hype bubble? 

Why is this absurd? 

I'm reasonably sure that those for whom walking is an option are not going to shell out $1,400 for a pair of roller skates with AI in them for our "commute." 

Really? AI-ified roller skates?

This company wants to make sure you get that annoying small talk with your coffee... whether you want it or not 

This company, NeuroSpot shows every sign of being absolutely incorrigible about their big brother-esque surveillance technology. I stumbled on this originally by looking at this LinkedIn post that shows the technology being applied in a coffee shop to ensure that employees were talking to customers often enough. If you check out the comments you'll see that NeuroSpot proudly confirms that the video is their software. 

Their website is ... terrifying with the blasé way they present their surveillance technology. They suggest constant surveiling of schools, hospitals, restaurants and private property. Because really, what could go wrong?

Why is this absurd? 

There's so much here that's wrong. It's blatantly privacy-violating across so many jurisdictions. Their models are proprietary, meaning that we don't know how accurate any of this actually is. Not to mention that the things they claim to detect are incredibly hard to identify even for nation-states with virtually unlimited resources 

So these are just 3 examples of absurd uses of AI. I'm sure there are more out there - so let me know. What absurd uses of AI have you seen?