What popular product do you think is modern day snakeoil?

Irelephant@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 287 points –
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I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents. Why the fuck would I want to do that? Do these companies realize that literally no one is asking for this shit? I also saw an ad for a computer mouse that had AI inside it. Whatever that means.

I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents

I belive you got that notification but I honestly have no idea what it even means.

It's from the Adobe Acrobat app. Basically you can ask it to give you a summary of whatever document you're reading.

Oddly enough, that's one of the few functions I've found the LLMs useful for. Looking through big pdfs for specific information, lots of times "ctrl+f" doesn't do the trick because the exact term I'm looking for doesn't appear. Worse sometimes it's a phrase that could be in there under many synonyms. Using the LLM to find the actual info is pretty nice, it just isn't "AI".

Don’t knock it too quickly. I thought like you but one evening I was a little tipsy and started chatting with a PDF document. Let’s just say things got a heated and now we’re engaged.