this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
137 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37735 readers
309 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"fax machines are at odds with a world embracing artificial intelligence." So bring on the fax machines! MORE fax machines!
I don't see how that makes sense as a statement, an ai with access to a 56k modem can send a fax. It feels like they're just using ai as a buzzword.
The issue is not sending, it is receiving. With a fax you need to do some OCR to extract the text, which you then can feed into e.g an AI.
ChatGPT can recognize text on images already.
At horrendous expense, yes. Using it for OCR makes little sense. And compared to just sending the text directly, even OCR is expensive.
I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.
OCR existed long before the 486. AFAIK it was already used in the 70's or 80's to scan mail and presort them based on the postcode. I remember that postcards had light orange boxes (presumably because this color was invisible to B/W scanners?) with dots inside where you where supposed to write the postcode numbers in.
Doing OCR in a very specific format, in a small specific area, using a set of only 9 characters, and having a list of all possible results, is not really the same problem at all.
🤔
I meant OCR of arbitrary printed or faxed text, which really only became feasible for home users in the 1990s. There were professional, but often very limited, solutions earlier than that, of course.
My phone can recognize text on images. How hard could it be to send that data to an AI?
How many billion times do you generally do that, and how is battery life after?
I wouldn’t do it on my phone. 🙄
What I’m saying is that it would probably be fairly easy to incorporate an already existing technology in to an AI.
Yes, and what I'm saying is that it would be expensive compared to not having to do it.