We totally understand. Personally, I think this is a VERY interesting discussion (as were others on the FORUM about what digital minimalism actually means & what should be allowed and what shouldn’t), even if we don’t all land in exactly the same place on AI, it’s important to have an open discussion & to be respectful.
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@BartekFilipek thank you for weighing in here! It shows a lot of integrity and transparency.
On the one hand, I understand where you’re coming from. On the other hand, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. I’m curious what the calculus is here:
- Is the productivity gain worth the negative PR and associations that come with using these tools?
- Isn’t there a concern that Mudtia’s target market doesn’t want to indirectly support AI companies that are actively harming the environment and stealing IP?
- Is Mudita really just “like most companies”?
It feels like spending a dollar to save a nickel. There’s a lot wrapped up in the words “cost” and “productivity” when you consider the entire marketplace a product lives in, and words like “brand” and “trust” are just as important to the bottom line.
IDK - maybe you all are using some super ethical AI provider, in which case I’d love to hear that, but overall 1) I know I purposefully avoid advertising with AI in it and 2) I hate having a question mark around a company where before I was all-in.
Thanks for reading.
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@heartfelt_plushy, thank you for taking the time to share this – it’s clear you care about Mudita, and that means a lot to me.
Running a business, and pretty much every decision that comes with it, always carries some risk. Choosing to use AI to support parts of our business processes is one of those risks we’ve decided, deliberately, to take. Time will show whether that was the right call – but it’s a risk we’re comfortable standing behind.
Thanks again for caring enough to write in.
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@BartekFilipek once again, thank you for the reply and transparency.
I do need you all at Mudita to know that this stance is antithetical to the values of whatever portion of your customer base it is that I represent.
Moving forward, I hope you all will reconsider as the social, economic, and human consequences of (the mostly unsound use of) this technology become more apparent.
In the meantime, “it’s what you *do* that defines you” and as such my business will go toward supporting companies and creators that more closely align with my values and the long-term good of our species and planet.
We all have to make these choices while we still can, before the iron-toothed beast devours it all - all human creativity, willpower, and expertise - and we no longer know nor care what is real.
Farewell.
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Resistance is futile 
(“Resistance is futile” means that fighting or opposing a powerful force is completely pointless because the outcome cannot be changed)
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SAM: It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?
SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
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Welcome back. I think appropriate use of resources to produce an outcome is good. Judging outcomes on feelings about resources is questionable.
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I agree that some things are worth making a stand against, I wholeheartedly support artists and creators, and their struggles with AI art. I also believe creativity is the main reason the human race and the human soul has survived and flourished.
I appreciate that a company like Mudita has to be competitive in their market.
It’s a hard thing to balance when many of the competitors are prepared to go to any lengths to gain an advantage.
That being said I found it disappointing to see Mudita using AI. I feel a little better about it now Mudita have explained the extent of its use though.
I dread to think what world /society we will live in, 50 years from now. One where everything is a commodity and the human element has been so far removed from everything, that it no longer considered something that adds value . What a bleak prospect.
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That’s all well and good if you are making plastic spoons, but people do this all the time … many people will not buy products where ethical standards are not respected in the production, or workers are not paid enough.
Only someone who has an appreciation of art or creating something physically
Will understand the difference and its value to the human psyche. We could 3d print Michael Angelo’s David, and they may look the same but one is priceless and one is worthless
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I am an artist! pen & ink, watercolors… around 1984, the company I worked at got the little Apple Macintosh, oh my! that made my job in advertizing art obsolete, I had to learn something new.
The only thing constant is change.
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Indeed I learned to draw blue prints on a drawing board and paper, I now use computer, CAD didn’t make designers redundant they adapted to working differently, but they still have to be engineers and architects and have the skills knowledge and experience to understand the design concepts that are needed to do that job .
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I have to agree with this. I went in on the Kompakt as a personal resistance against big tech, as well as AI invading my personal tech and life. As an artist, I chose this path for myself. I don’t judge others. But I did consciously make the purchase with that in mind, not buying the commodore callback since their promo material was riddled with AI. I find it curious that a company promoting the conscious mindful lifestyle adopts the use of AI while we already know this technology negatively reshapes our attention, reasoning, writing, and learning in ways we don’t understand yet. If intentionality, sustainability, and human-centered design is your selling point, then I find this rather the opposite.
I found the comparison to the arrival of the computer not really similar to be honest. The computer arrived as a tool, AI is more like a co-creator, trained on huge datasets of human made (art)work (most of it unwillingly or unknowingly) and creates derivative material. A better comparison to the impact on society might be the industrial revolution. It devalues human work and creativity..
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Excellent explanation …. Totally agree
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Just a small voice from my side here, because I think in discussions like this we need to be quite precise.
Of course, we are not in favour of stealing somebody’s work, copying somebody’s art, or doing things which are simply morally wrong. Full stop.
But when we talk about “AI”, I think we need to be very, very precise, because today this one term is used for a huge number of completely different things.
It is one thing when AI helps you smooth some text, suggests a few new slogans, or helps with scientific research by searching through a huge amount of information and collecting data from many sources very quickly. And it is something quite different when it is used to copy somebody’s art or creative work.
And I think this is really the main point I would like to add here: for me this topic is simply not black and white, and I would be careful with simplified judgements.
Of course, damaging the planet is bad. There is no discussion about that. But on the other hand, I personally use AI quite a lot for different, more scientific types of research, and I can see how enormous amount of time / effort it can save.
So there is also a slightly provocative question I sometimes ask myself: what actually uses less energy? One AI query asking it to prepare a research report, or me sitting in front of a monitor for several hours, opening dozens of pages and trying to collect the same information manually?
I am not saying I know the answer. Actually, this is exactly my point. I think the answer may be much less obvious than it looks at first sight.
So this is just my private voice in this discussion. I think AI brings some very real ethical problems, but also some very real benefits, and putting all of it into one box called “AI = bad” probably is too much of simplification.
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@Michal_Kicinski thank you for contributing to the discussion here. I appreciate your perspective, but I think it misses the bigger picture that caused me to start this thread in the first place: For me, this discussion is not about the relative merits, etc. of “AI” - it’s about Mudita.
Why do people choose to purchase Mudita’s products? For whatever part of your customer base it is that I represent, It’s because we are making intentional choices around the technology that we use, the companies that we support, and therefore the future that we are voting for with our wallets.
We are making other conscious choices around technology, especially AI. For us, we cannot in good conscience give money to AI companies for a myriad of reasons that I’ve already expressed.
Thus, when we as customers see this on Mudita’s website:
It feels confusing.
This is not in line with the company we thought we were supporting. We want to choose craft over convenience, artistic endeavor over generation, and financially support a vision of the future where tech is human-centered.
This is just market feedback for you, from a real paying customer. Do with it what you will, but it something that I needed you all to know since I’ve been a fan of yours since the Mudita Pure days and own a Kompakt and 2 Harmonys (one for me and one for my wife). I made all of these purchases prior to “AI modified” showing up in promotional materials.
If I visited the Mudita website today for the first time, I would bounce as soon as I saw “AI modified” on the photos, no matter how great everything else was.
Moving forward, I would love for Mudita to continue to be an option for mindful technology purchases for me and my family, but I also can’t in good conscience support mainstream AI companies via passthrough.
And maybe you all are using some super-ethical AI provider based there in Europe, in which case I’d love to hear that as it would allay a lot of my concerns. But - and I speak as an American - US-based AI companies are evil.
If it helps drive the point home, I have a friend who works for a well-known video game company that makes digital versions of many popular board games. He told me that they are intentionally choosing not to use AI in their processes because of how it would be perceived and received by their player base and potential customers. That’s what I’m getting at.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
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Newcomer to this thread, but I would like to echo the quote above. I am choosing Mudita phones to escape the digital hellscape that the existing crop of tech companies are forcing upon us and much like @heartfelt_plushy felt a little twinge of disappointment to see the AI Generated labels across the marketing material - but very grateful that you adopted the EU recommendations and marked it up as such.
I presume your engineers are also using AI tools to code in a bid to speed up development? This is a double-edged sword too because I can appreciate that as customers we get an improved product in our hands faster than ever before, but would hope that you are strict in ensuring that the product is secure and robust and the codebase is not a bundled mess that can only be read, understood, and debugged by your non-human engineers.
I, unfortunately know way too many very skilled software engineers who will claim they “have not written a line of code in over a year” and are now simply reduced to prompt engineers. This path is a wild self-destruction of the industry and the things that make us human for those at the top to increase profit margins.
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I’m more of the extreme kind. See:
@Michal_Kicinski : I may be an outlier but, honestly, even if the image was not AI modified, it feels stock picture and fake. I hate those. They feel like cheap scams. You know what turns me on? Real pictures of the team using their own product. With unperfect hairs, unperfect skin. Humans. Then the product, the real one. (Mudita does a good job overal on this, really, I like the website).
Same applies for slogans. I hate them. I want to read specs and real text. Once again, I’ve a turn on: when a website tells me honestly all the problems with his products and why it isn’t for. It feels deeply honest, I like it.
In fact, I’ve learned over the years to instinctively takes everything that look like marketing as a straight lie. Because it is most of the time.
But, agreed, I may not be representative of too many people. But just be aware that people like me exists and, from what I hear, in some niche, there are more people like me than you would expect.
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This is not something I would ever use as I keep my private files in my own equipment. It’s interesting being opposed to the AI but suggesting remote storage as a subscription? No thank you. This isn’t anything I am interested in.
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Unfortunately the internet is being corrupted and slowly or not so slowly destroyed by AI, most of the images and much of the video content on a high percentage of online sources is AI generated. It’s even coined the phrase “the enshitification of the internet”
The more AI content there is the worse it will become, as AI will be using AI generated content to generate responses to new AI queries, and real content will slowly be so diluted it will eventually hardly be present .
I personally despise AI content of any nature. I find it to be disingenuous to artists and artisans who have spent years learning a skill . Whilst I am prepared to cut Mudita a little slack as they are only using AI to enhance / tweak images, I agree with others in this thread who have said that it doesn’t really fit with the perceived values & ethos of the company
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Online storage / cloud back is not something I would wish to use WRT the Kompakt either, purely from a privacy perspective, I prefer to have local control of what is on my Kompakt.
Opposing the use of AI and promoting cloud back up are not really connected in any way, so not sure why you’re surprised, someone could be in favour of one and against the other. cloud backup is convenient but not really conducive to a minimal device, with not a lot stored to it. Feelings regarding AI are more about respecting artists and professionals and specialists in their field
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