The hardest thing about naming the biggest losers of the year in tech is that in 2024, once again, it felt like everyone lost. Between the depressing cycle of social media will-they-or-won’t-they banning TikTok in the US and the never-ending edited and deepfake content that has left everyone questioning what’s real, the world lost. And it lost.
But some areas were particularly troubling this year. In particular, AI and dedicated AI gadgets spread further than ever before, extending not just to our digital assistants and search engines but also to our wearable devices. We saw Intel’s position decline further and robot manufacturers say goodbye to Lightning cables, as well. I’m pretty happy about that last point, though.
Every year our annual collection of the worst tech developments is shorter than usual, but that might be because we’re all exhausted. And also because most of the bad stuff can be attributed to AI, social media or misinformation. Still, here we go down this horrifying memory lane, hoping we can avoid similar pitfalls in the future.
Generative AI in every possible crevice
2024 was a year in which consumer-facing AI tools were becoming harder to ignore. This is thanks to tech giants Google, Meta, and finally Apple, who have incorporated AI tools into the most used software on the planet. And in this effort to bring AI to everyone, I can’t help but wonder, who exactly is asking for it, and is anyone actually using it?
Over the past few months, I’ve been testing Samsung Chromebooks with several AI tools as well as trying out various Apple intelligence features introduced during the autumn. This all came to a head in one of Engadget’s Slack channels in early December, when Apple launched its generative emoji and Image Playground features.
Extracting AI-generated images from Image Playground was easy enough, and Genmoji feels like the logical next step, since Apple introduced its own personalized Memoji in 2018. But overall, the results felt uninspiring, disappointing, and — perhaps worst of all — extremely lame.
Since I take a lot of photos on my iPhone, the Photos app has a lot of photos under my name (it will group similar faces together for years, if you allow it to). With hundreds of images to choose from, Image Playground should have no problem creating a believable replica of me… playing guitar on the moon, right? Well, yes and no.
In this image, as well as the images created by my colleagues Cherlyn Lo, Valentina Palladino, and Sam Rutherford, there are some facial features that made me feel like the AI-generated cartoon I was looking at was at least inspired by these people. But they all gave off seriously uncanny valley vibes; Instead of the cute digital cartoons we all created with Bitmoji, these results are lifeless illustrations with no charm and no finger-pointing.
In a completely different vein, I had the opportunity to try out Google’s “Help me” summary feature on a 250-page government report. I knew I didn’t have time to read the entire document and was just curious what AI could do for me here. Turns out, not much.
The summary was so brief that it was essentially meaningless — not unreasonably so, since it tried to condense 250 pages into about 100 words. I tried this trick on a recent review I was writing, and it did a better job of capturing the gist of the article, and it also answered follow-up questions more accurately.
But given that the final product was maybe four pages, my impression is that AI does a good job of summarizing things that most people can read on their own in five minutes. If you have something more complex, forget it.
I could go on and on – I’ve been laughing a lot with my coworkers over the ridiculous notification summaries I get from Apple Intelligence – but I think I’ve made my point. We’re in the midst of an AI arms race, where big companies are desperate to get ahead with these products before they’re ready for primetime or even all that useful. And to what end? I don’t think any AI company is meaningfully answering a consumer need or finding a way to make people’s lives better or easier.