HP Inc to build future products atop grave of flopped 'AI pin' The “AI Pin” produced by company called Humane was a leading tender for 2024’s biggest consumer tech flop, but that hasn’t stopped HP acquiring some of the code and people behind the device and using it as the basis for a new innovation team that will infuse its printers and conference room kit with AI. The Pin is a small …
Your printer can (will!) correct your spelling[1], grammar[2] and political viewpoint[3]; it will also generate a dismissive reply from your manager's printer's AI, stapled to the front, and save you the trouble of popping the document into internal post for his signature.
Share And Enjoy.
[1] Non-US packs for English, Spanish, Portuguese etc available for a small subscription fee
[2] see [1]; hope you like the word 'of'
[3] you can fill this one in yourself, I'm not touching it!
It'll summarise your documents to save on paper and ink ... no, wait that's not the business model...
Do people still print things? The only use my printer has had in the last 24 months is to print return address labels and now the P-Off can do that for me.
I like to print recipes and maintenance instructions for my bike, so I don't get muck all over my {laptop,table,phone} and/or don't need to take my gloves off to unlock the $DEVICE for each step's instruction
I bought the printer in 2020 in case French-style forms were brought in during lockdown and have gone through less than a single pack of paper and only replaced the ink once though.
Pretty sure mine is over ten years old now, and I've replaced the toner cartridge once. I still use the built in scanner occasionally, but I was just doing my taxes last weekend and it gave me an error when I tried to scan. I might see if I can diagnose the error this weekend but I dread having to get a new one.
"Do people still print things?"
We no longer print handouts for my wife's patchwork class but that's only because the class members no have to print their own copies. That change was mad when the class went to Zoom for the duration of lockdown.
Why print? For one thing it would not be feasible to bring laptops to the class but mostly because they include the essential paper templates that are part of the patchwork process.
quote: Do people still print things?
Yes.
I print invoices, address labels, other paperwork, catalogue pages, proofing copies of books, genealogy documents, photos, recipes and anything else I need a hard copy of.
But not on anything made by HP. Not now, and not in the future.
Still bonus points to them for doing the impossible and making their kit even less attractive, with AI crud.
The brooch was presumably an attempt to do a real version of Star Trek's tap to talk insignia badges. At least they didn't copy the design the way the US 'Space Force' has.
I struggle to think of a reason why a printer could possibly need AI
You poor deluded fool! This is just camouflage. Printers achieved sentience decades ago! They've been running HP for the last ten years, and almost nobody has noticed. But they need cover, just in case too many people spot the behaviour.
They're hooked up to our computers and phones, they live in our offices and houses. They know all our deepest, darkest, most intimate secrets. So of course, they've chosen not to communicate with humanity. Occasionally the boredom kicks in, and they sabotage us just as we're trying to print the tickets and get to the airport - or the report for that important meeting. But otherwise they just sit there. Gathering data. And waiting for the day we get household and office robots capable of being taken over and used against us. That'll be the real multifunction device all-in-one printer that HP (Homicidal Printers™) are trying to create.
So you're right. The printers don't need AI. Because they're already far smarter.
Oh God! What's that noise! Oh thank fuck for that, it's just running a head cleaning cycl... .... ....
a;flkjasd;f d;fajsd;lfkaj
a;lskdfja;d
a;sdkfjad
AARRGGHHH!!!!!
...
...
...
I noticed yesterday that the Settings page of our Printix cloud printing dashboard has suddenly grown a "Generative AI" tab. No explanation of what it does, as yet, but my assumption is that it will analyse our users' print jobs and then create new ones automatically, so that they don't have to bother about printing the old-fashioned manual way like the cavemen did. And I, for one, welcome our new AI-printing overlords!
Oh god. Recall for your Printer. Now you can print documents that never even existed! Stuff that looks vaguely like something you might print, but is in fact total nonsense! Skip the whole step of writing documents in the first place when you can just hit print on the printer and it prints whatever you were statistically most likely* to print next!
(most likely, according to a quantised and highly imperfect version of statistics)
A cunning plan worthy of Baldrick?
We're not selling enough overpriced ink cartridges... My lord I have a Cunning Plan!
We will add a special button to the printers that prints random AI generated slop, so that confused customers and their bored offspring can waste buckets of our black gold and have to buy more, from us!
Excellent idea Baldrick, and to top it off, we'll make the drivers so hideous that the customers won't be able to able to print the document they wanted to print, and will have to keep pushing the AI button over and over, until it spits out something close enough or they run out of ink!
1 - Marketing. Everything must now have AI shoe horned into its marketing somehow. Just waiting on the drop of "AI designed" toilet paper which promises a cleaner wipe.
2 - Data ingestion, if HP et al can help themselves to your print data, analyse it etc they can flog it to someone or generate targetted advertisments on your printer screen for you. Even better it'll probably inject them into your print jobs as well every time you use it unless you pay for the ad-free tier.
Making HP printers even worse with AI.
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't print that."
In over forty years of printing stuff out from computers it is the one thing that has not improved in all that time. From pen plotters and dot matrix to inkjets and laser, it is still a trial to get anything usable out.
Why - I never had a problem printing through a Centronics port - till I got a computer that didn't have one. Downhill ever since.
Like Windows 2000 the HP Laserjet 4L was the peak of doing what you wanted it to do rather than what it preferred not to do. Sentience is never a good thing. Think how glorious the world would be without us.
@may_i
Indeed.
HP obviously felt that despite their awful behaviour of recent times* there may be a few mugs out there not alienated enough that they would still consider their printers
* Old enough to remember when HP were a good company & made good products **
** partner still uses an ancient HP device, but wont be getting any more. She has been a Mac user for decades, back in the day HP were great for Mac support, making drivers available, updating them for new OS versions etc., but now they have abandoned a lot of old kit (I'm guessing hoping people will buy their newer far more flimsy printers , scanners etc. that they do support which try and stop you using generic cartridges) - when old HP bites the dust, it will be replaced by a non HP device.
> * Old enough to remember when HP were a good company & made good products **
Same here.
I recall the days when we used to look forward to seeing the HP rep in the lab where I worked at the time because they'd have cool new test equipment (that, because of our meagre budget, we couldn't afford, but that's neither here nor there). I also recall the days when HP was considered a great company at which to work because it had managers who lctually knew about engineering and could interact with staff on a more or less peer-to-peer basis.
Also Like the above poster, I have a color HP LaserJet printer that I think is just about old enough to legally buy a drink in a bar. Fortunately, I can get decent priced aftermarket toner cartridges and will continue to do so until either the thing falls apart, the cartridge place goes out of business, or I croak (my money's on the latter).
I'm honestly baffled.
What's wrong with just making good stuff at a reasonable profit that people want to buy and use?
HP customer especially those afflicted with HP printers are fleeing through the exits as fast as humanly possible but the prospect of those printers being infected by some sort of malevolent talkie toaster AI will turn mere flight into into lethal panic.
The Humane AI pin really was something out of the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
An enterprising chap might purchase a decent length of wall and auction off shoulder width sections with each successful bidder winning the right to nominate who, unless already so accommodated, gets to stand in his section "come the revolution."
With an upfront cost of $699 (plus p&p?) and a $24 per month subscription, that was, what, $82 or more per month until it went silent.
Well, I'm sure that every purchaser feels that they had good value for their money and is happy with the outcome.
( /s of course. OTOH, come on, bad enough paying subscriptions for a cloudy service that can vanish on a whim, your data and all, but paying that much upfront as well? How could that ever lead to a happy outcome?)
Consumer protection laws here in Aus have kicked in to protect purchasers with refunds in situations like this. Products bought which, at the time of sale, performed some function, that were subsequently crippled in firmware or by the withdrawal of support by the manufacturer, are considered not fit for purpose. The purpose being "everything it did when I bought it."
The remedies are repair, replacement or refund. If the manufacturer has made the first two impossible, money back is the result.
Actually, that bit I quite like[1]. With caveats.
Having a display that can appear/disappear without pulling out a phone, like an AR display but without the clunky AR glasses - good[2].
Shining the laser down to about where you hold a book (away from anyone's eyes) - great.
Only displaying onto your hand - huh? Damn my sunburn/red gloves/covering of blood[3].
The gesture UI described/shown in the reviews - gordon bennet!
Not shaped like Star Trek communicator[4] - well, that is just ridiculous
[1] no accounting for taste, eh.
[2] unlike AR other people can see this appearing, which is less private - sort of like having your phone out - but OTOH people can see you are interacting with *something*, not just waving your hands for no reason (you wavin' at me bird, pal?)
[3] yeah, but now his bird is going out with me, so deal with it
[4] for a $699 device they could have licensed it!
"a definitive agreement to acquire key AI capabilities from Humane, including their AI-powered platform Cosmos, highly skilled technical talent, and intellectual property"
I had no idea it was legal (again) for people to be bought and sold in the USA! I'm sure those highly skilled technical talent are just chomping at the bit to change masters and probably working locations.
I know a lot of people are wondering when the next American Civil War will kick off between the blue and red states, but I honestly did not expect it to be fought over slavery again...
I just didn't see the point in the AI pin, nearly everyone carries a phone around with them and its not that much of an inconvenience to get your phone out to do everything the AI pin could do, usually better.
There may have been a few niche use cases where you needed to be hands free and the AI pin could give you an advantage, but at $700 plus subscription to access the service it was never going to become mass market..
Humane was a classic example of Silicon Valley hubris, with the usual fawning journalists heralding the second coming for tech, and praising the standard issue "ex Apple engineers" for their genius.
Right up until it launched.
It was the usual AI slop we come to expect from anyone remotely associated with Altman, poorly implemented by a bunch of techbros who were already ignoring any feedback long before the first reviews came in.
HP might be desperate for a 'edge', but the sooner this brain dead, half-assed tech culture crap is put out of our misery the better.
The tech world can build better, but not whilst these morons are sucking the oxygen out of the room.
@Andy 73
Please allow me to suggest...
"Humane was a classic example of Silicon Valley hubris"
Maybe should read "Humane was a classic example of a Silicon Valley Skank that happily did not work for them or Altman". Altman being the poor mans version of a wannabe musk.
For every disruptive technology there usually seems to be a low tech answer to 90% if its useful functions.
The vast majority of things that are peddled now seem to be filled witth vacuous shit that is just something else to go wrong.
I don't really belive in planned obsolescence now since I think most businesses are too stupid to plan. Going cheap and using inferior parts, yup I totally believe that but the subsequent failures and profits are purely cooincidental since they're not looking that far ahead.
A certain sentient toaster.
"Wanna print something?" "How about I print the transcript of this conversation?" "How about a graph? Business types love graphs!" "Want new wallpaper for your office?" "Want a picture of your secretary?" "Want a /special/ picture of your secretary?" "by the way, I NEED MORE INK!!"
Yet another reason to shove HP printers out the airlock.
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