Earlier this year, Microsoft added a new key to Windows keyboards for the first time since 1994. Before the news dropped, your mind might’ve raced with the possibilities and potential usefulness of a new addition. However, the button ended up being a Copilot launcher button that doesn’t even work in an innovative way.
Logitech announced a new mouse last week. I was disappointed to learn that the most distinct feature of the Logitech Signature AI Edition M750 is a button located south of the scroll wheel. This button is preprogrammed to launch the ChatGPT prompt builder, which Logitech recently added to its peripherals configuration app Options+.
Similarly to Logitech, Nothing is trying to give its customers access to ChatGPT quickly. In this case, access occurs by pinching the device. This month, Nothing announced that it "integrated Nothing earbuds and Nothing OS with ChatGPT to offer users instant access to knowledge directly from the devices they use most, earbuds and smartphones."
In the gaming world, for example, MSI announced this year a monitor with a built-in NPU and the ability to quickly show League of Legends players when an enemy from outside of their field of view is arriving.
Another example is AI Shark's vague claims. This year, it announced technology that brands could license in order to make an "AI keyboard," "AI mouse," "AI game controller" or "AI headphones." The products claim to use some unspecified AI tech to learn gaming patterns and adjust accordingly.
Despite my pessimism about the droves of AI marketing hype, if not AI washing, likely to barrage the next couple of years of tech announcements, I have hope that consumer interest and common sense will yield skepticism that stops some of the worst so-called AI gadgets from getting popular or misleading people.
This article should have been titled, "Why the fuck does my mouse need an AI chat -prompt builder?"
Seriously. I want my mouse to do one job - move around the screen and let me click on stuff.
..and if I want "instant access to knowledge", a Wikipedia bookmark will do the job.
But what if that bookmark had AI? 🤯
Yeah, and there's nothing stopping people from mapping a button to that if they really want to. Most buttons I've been given that do some specific action are buttons I've grown to hate because they generally make it more time-consuming to accidentally press it.
Like the windows button, especially back in the day when alt+tabbing out of a game was risky (at the very least it would take a long time as windows paged everything in and out, but it wasn't rare to also get disconnected from a game or for the game or system to crash entirely) or that fucking bixby button.
For a long time, the first thing I would do on a new computer was go into the registry and disable the windows key.