Image Transcription: Twitter Post
sarah radz, @sarahradz_
I want AI to anticipate what groceries I’m running low on, search every flier and website in my city to find the best price, and compile me a weekly list based on best deals per fewest stops. I do not want AI to make a picture of me if I were an astronaut.
Idk man, AI art generation is pretty rad, it opens a whole new world of artistic endeavors up for people who never had the access, ability, time, or energy to do so otherwise. Also, por que no los dos?
no, it doesn’t. The prompter is the one “commissioning a painting”. That does not make them an artist.
Creating art is creating art. Back in the day you had to mix your own pigments and put those on a canvas. Now you can buy pigments and canvas, or skip that altogether and go digital. That doesn’t make digital art any less art. It’s the same thing with AI art. It’s another tool for us to use.
New tools come up for professions ALL THE TIME, and it’s up to people in those fields to figure out how to roll with it. This tool is out of the box and it’s not going back in.
What we should be asking now is how do we ETHICALLY use this tool? Well, probably by crediting people. Licensing any copywritten material that needs it. Don’t use it to make gross shit like deep fakes or direct rip-offs. Which, just because it’s easier to do these things with an AI, doesn’t mean they didn’t happen with Photoshop etc.
There’s also more nuance to the process than “type a prompt get image.” That works, but it’ll get you shit, inconsistent results. You still have to play around with the image, adjusting parameters and sometimes even loading it into a “real” image manipulation software.
To give you an idea of how I personally am using stable diffusion, I’ve been using it to generate a few dozen images that look like a character in going for. I’ll grab those images, edit them, and then use them to train my own LoRA (a kind of mini, specific, model) to use for future generation of that character. It’s actually work, just work I’m better at than manipulating images manually.
sure, sure
Cool, good addition to the conversation. I’m willing to accept that I might be wrong, if someone could provide me a single actual logical point that makes any kind of sense. Instead I get “but it takes no skiiiilllll” or “sure sure.”
The bad news is the AI they’ll pay for will instead estimate your net worth and the highest price you’re likely to pay. They’ll then dynamicly change the price of things like groceries to make sure the price they’re charging will maximize their profits on any given day. That’s the AI you’re going to get.
If capitalism brought me into this world, will it also take me out of it?
Are you subscribed to Existence Premium or just Basic?
In 977 years, a suicide booth will cost 25¢
An people are complaining about inflation…
You are (currently) more profitable alive than dead so… no, now get back to work!
Capitalism has brought about as many people to this world as any Vampires have.
The prices will automatically adjust like an Uber algorithm for supply and demand, so as people buy the item it keeps going up and when people stop buying it if decreases slowly.
I heard they do something like this on Uber already.
That is the “apps” you will get. But there will always be an open source version that will do what the comunity need and wants.
I hope you’re right. I don’t think you’re right, but i hope you’re right.
Damn that’s depressing. :(
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So many people in this thread saying “you can already do this if you just do all these extra steps” like avoiding extra work isn’t the whole point.
Exactly. But also I’m blown away that most grocery stores don’t list inventory and prices on the website. I can only think this is because they don’t want to show prices in an attempt to get you to go to the store.
They absolutely don’t want to make automatic comparison shopping that easy. The goal of every grocery store is to get you there with one or two specific good deals they advertise and then have you do the rest of your shopping there because nobody wants to go to a second store and MAYBE get a slightly better deal but also maybe get a worse deal.
I mean… Yeah? Grocery stores want you in the store. If they didn’t they’d be shipping only warehouses.
I just mean that they must have done some research that says it is more profitable to only list a few prices instead of everything.
But also I’m blown away that most grocery stores don’t list inventory and prices on the website. I can only think this is because they don’t want to show prices in an attempt to get you to go to the store.
yuuup.
I don’t think you need AI for that.
- First, anticipating what groceries are low: Simplest implementation would be a list where the user manually enters additions and removals.
- Secondly searching every flier and website in the city. Okay that one will be a bit trickier. First you’d need to gather a list of all stores in the city, and then look for any deal. The big challenge here is that they don’t just have a common API where you check. You either need to program a bot to scrape all their web presences, or convince them to provide the information in a common format.
- The last step seems like it could be related to the traveling salesman problem.
Why are people like this? It’s like somehow they’ve not actually lived in the real world for any of their lives.
If a product like that existed, and bloody hell would it be complicated, then there wouldn’t be a best price for groceries. The fact that a product like this doesn’t exist is why there can be variation in price. Otherwise there would be no point.
There are a lot of considerstions when buying stufff other than price. Some people buy only local and are willing to pay a premium. Others only buy organic. Others boycott Nestle. Others just buy what “feels” right. Some just have money to burn and literally can’t be bothered by money.
Sure, having something like that could upset the balance, but not everyone will use it. And even if a lot of people would, you’d still habe to take in things like distance or Costco memberships, etc.
Also forgot to add - imagine a store having two products, one right next to the other. They’re exactly the same other than one being store-brand and 50% cheaper than the other. Surely no-one would buy the other one, yet it still sells. You don’t need AI to tell you store-brand is the same thing but cheaper.
Eliminating those variations in prices would be to everyone’s benefit
You can already do something similar manually with an app called Grocy. I tried it and didn’t last two week, too much time spent scanning barcodes and dealing with inventory. I was hoping to save time to generate grocery list faster, not spend my life on it.
So you can’t already do something similar because what OP wants doesn’t exist
This is ridiculous, just go to prison if you want someone making all of your decisions for you. The intelligence within the walls lets just say is very artificial
AI could do this. Conventional programming could do it faster and better, even if it was written by AI.
It’s an important concept to grasp
Cameras in your fridge and pantry to keep tabs on what you have, computer vision to take inventory, clustering to figure out which goods can be interchanged with which, language modeling applied to a web crawler to identify the best deals, and then some conventional code to aggregate the results into a shopping list
Unless you’re assuming that you’re gonna be supplied APIs to all the grocery stores which have an incentive to prevent this sort of thing from happening, and also assuming that the end user is willing, able, and reliable enough to scan every barcode of everything they buy
This app basically depends on all the best ai we already have except for image generation
Cameras and computer vision aren’t necessary. Food products already come with upcs. All you need is a barcode reader to input stuff and to track what you use in recipes.
Tracking what you use would be a lot easier with AI. Then you wouldn’t have to keep a barcode scanner in the kitchen. You could just have a camera pointed at your food prep space
is AI good enough to manage that with just a camera? how would it determine how much of a given product you uses? Like if you dump a cup of flour in a bowel, how does it know how much that was.
If you have to point the product in front of the camera to register it anyway, might as well use a barcode reader anyway because it’s the same thing at that point just without the risk of the AI misidentifying something.
Yeah, I did think of the barcode approach, but I didn’t think anyone would be willing to scan every item, which is why I ignored it
However, revisiting this question made me realize that we could probably have the user scan receipts. It would take some doing but you could probably extract all the information from the receipt because it’s in a fairly predictable format, and it’s far less onerous.
OTOH, you still have to scan barcodes every time you cook with something, and you’d probably want some sort of mechanism to track partial consumption and leftovers, though a minimum viable product could work without that
The tough part, then, is scouring the internet for deals. Should be doable though.
Might try to slap something together tonight or tomorrow for that first bit, seems pretty easy, I bet you’ve got open source libraries for handling barcodes, and scanning receipts can probably just be done with existing OCR tech, error correction using minimum edit distance, and a few if statements to figure out which is the quantity and which is the item. That is, if my adhd doesn’t cause me to forget
OTOH, you still have to scan barcodes every time you cook with something, and you’d probably want some sort of mechanism to track partial consumption and leftovers, though a minimum viable product could work without that
If you can also keep recipes in the system you could skip scanning the barcodes here. You’d just need to input how many servings you prepared and any waste. Even if the “recipe” is just “hot pocket” or something. If the system knows how much is in a package it can deduct what you use from the total and add it to the list when you need more.
I think you can achieve a similar result by having one giant DB so we can average out general consumption and then have a personal/family profile, where we in the first place manually feed the AI with data like, what did we bought, exp date, when did we partly or fully consume it. Although intensive at first I think AI will increasingly become more accurate whereby you will need to input less and less data as the data will be comming from both you and the rest of the users. The only thing that still needs to be input is “did you replace it ?”
This way we don’t need cameras
I’m stoked that you’ve got it all hammered out, let me know when you’re done.
Sure no problem, I just need you to puch in some data manually so we can get started. Can you get thid stack done by tomorrow? Awesome, see you tomorrow!
Oh, so you’re saying that the only data the algorithm needs in the limit is whether or not the user deviated from the generated shopping list, and if so, how, right?
This is true, it’s just a bit difficult to cross the gap from here to there
Rolling this out for tools and parts at my work. Tool boxes with cameras in the drawers to make sure you put it back. Vending machines for parts with auto order.
I’m sure Sara is not ready to be served the optimal outcome from a competitive multi-agent simulation. Because when everyone gets that AI, oh boy the local deals on groceries will be fun.
The equilibrated state your imagining never happens. This is like talking about when the ocean finally levels out. The ocean’s never going to level out. There will always be waves to surf.
Damn no let me make my mistakes, there are way enough people telling me what to do, I need the AI to create pictures of my cat conquering Europe and that’s it
Wasn’t the first part what “smart fridges” were supposed to solve like 10 years ago?
No. That’s just what they wanted you to believe. All they really did was find a way to separate people from more money.
I found out two people in my family bought smart fridges and both listed watching tv and listening to music as reasons for purchase. Not the only ones mind you, but some of the first ones mentioned. I don’t get it.
Not even of porn?
That’s not ai.
It can be done with simple nondeterministic polynomial algorithm.
