I replied to the 1.6.0 update email with the following feedback for the Mudita team and wanted to share it publicly as well. I’m particularly hoping that we’ll see Mudita choose not to use AI for generating/enhancing images moving forward.
Hi Mudita team,
A few thoughts / pieces of feedback for you:
Love your products! Happy owner of both a Kompakt and a Harmony 2. Keep up the great work!
I appreciate your transparency in the images in this email, but please - don’t use AI images or AI as an image editor. My reasoning behind this request:
As a consumer, AI images in ads or content scream “low effort” to me and I scroll right past them.
I’m intentionally using your devices to move me and my family away from the current tech AI craze and toward a healthy relationship with technology.
Finally, there are human creators that we need to support while we still have the option to do so. Please don’t fall into the trap of short-term speed gains at the expense of long-term environmental and human consequences.
Please consider offering an optional iCloud-like subscription for the Kompakt. Someplace where the device can auto-upload photos, do backups, etc. This doesn’t have to be a huge effort on your part. You might even be able to whitelabel Nextcloud for this. At the end of the day, I’d love to have a way to support you all on an ongoing basis, plus these features would make the Kompakt much more useful.
Thanks for reading and for the great products. Please stay human, please stay mindful. The world needs more companies like you!
100% undermines my confidence in the integrity of any company using AI art. The support emails I’ve received from Mudita are also definitely long winded AI drafts, which is kinda gross. Anyways, still love the phone so far and the dev community here. Hope yall can cut this out.
PS: definitely appreciate that using AI is for better or worse part of the modern development workflow. But at the risk of thumping my Orange Catholic Bible, simulacrum of reality or human creativity is something I will not normalize.
This should be highlighted in red above the screen of everyone using AI to produce content: people notice. They are not impressed by your design. They don’t read what you didn’t even write. They either don’t care or hate you for that.
So, in short, in you are not in the spam/deception business, you are working against yourself.
Nope. Multiple studies have showed that it is mostly an illusion. SUre, it could save time sometimes when working alone. But if you want to “save time” to communicate with others, you are not communicating anymore, you are wasting other people time.
I’m a writer. And, believe me, I can spot AI text immediately. Not because it is not well written but because, by essence, it is empty in content. Same for art/picture. It is just empty.
The “you’ll get used to it” is pathetic (and rude) and remind me of:
"You’ll get used to it” is too easy. I refuse to get used to it. One of the reasons for me choosing the Kompakt, like OP, is because I don’t want AI features on my phone. That said, people and companies are allowed to go down this path of course, and so consumers will have the possibility to change their mind. For example I didn’t pre-order the Commodore Callback because of their AI generated promo material, but now I am definitely a bit more sceptical towards what Mudita are communicating as well.
If a chief from a famous restaurant was telling you that he refuses to eat McDonald because it is shit, would you reply “You’ll get used to it” without sounding condescending (and a little dumb too) ?
I gladly accept the apologies, I don’t want a heated argument but the point I want to highlight is that people like AI in fields where they have no expertise. As soon as they have expertise, they are a lot more critical and clearly hate it without knowing it is from AI. Because it is, by design, empty and an average of everything.
Every use of AI alienate people with some expertise. That’s sometimes what you want (spammers/scammers want to get rid of too educated people, for formatting is often intentional). Big cheap brand want, on purpose, to get a “cheap image” so people really believe that the product is cheap.
Now, the real question is always a benefit/cost ratio. In that case: how much time is Mudita saving by using AI for marketing and how much does it costs in terms of trust/image within their niche community?
I don’t have any answer but this very post seems to indicate that there’s at least some of the active community who care. I would be curious to have a clear statement about AI by Mudita founder. Is AI compatible with mindfulness? That would be a nice debate to have.
(An opposite example is Protonmail which was once very niche but choose to target a larger audience by making some sort of “Another google but with some privacy-washing marketing”. In some circles this strategy backfires a lot but it looks like this allowed them to reach a wider audience)
I think AI makes people feel productive while their real skills slowly evaporate. It’s not really a matter of “liking” it or “getting used to it”. It’s a matter of:
What is it doing to our brains?
What is it doing to our planet?
We’re all being pushed to adopt AI like it’s free and has no consequences or side effects when in reality it comes with a very high price tag across many different aspects of life.
It’s sad because I assumed that given their ethos Mudita wouldn’t be taking AI shortcuts for something as simple as photoshopping a UI on top of a stock photo, but here we are. I’d love for someone from Mudita to weigh in here, let us know what the internal conversations are because LLMs seem antithetical to Mudita’s mission and values.
I don’t know why I would be opposed to a tool, AI is a tool, for example AI images are good for expedient concept development. If you use a 3d printer, instead of making a mold and such processes…