The Google Clips Camera Puts AI Behind the Lens (theverge.com)

The Verge's Dieter Bohn reviews Google's AI camera, dubbed "Clips," which was announced alongside the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. Here's an excerpt: You know what a digital camera is. It's a lens and a sensor, with a display to see what you're looking at, and a button to take the picture. Google Clips is a camera, but it only has some of those parts. There's no display. There's a shutter button, but it's completely optional to use. Instead, it takes pictures for you, using machine learning to recognize and learn faces and look for interesting moments to record. I don't know if parents -- Google's target market -- will want it. I don't know if Google can find a way to explain everything it is (and isn't) to a broad enough audience to sell the thing in big numbers, especially at $249. I also don't know what the release date will be, beyond that it will be "coming soon." But I do know that it's the most fascinating camera I've used in a very long time.

Comments

More ways to mine your privacy!

[Anonymous Coward]

It puts AI behind the lens, and your data in China.

And Poland.

And Uzbekistan.

And Uruguay.

Re:More ways to mine your privacy!

[arth1]

That's okay. As long as the data is kept out of reach of the American three letter agencies, I feel better. Those are the ones with an ability to harm me, and an incentive to justify their existence.

Re:Telescreen

[mccalli]

The future is turning out much more like Brave New World than 1984 or Shape of Things To Come. Both have their parts to add, but Brave New World is the one that's more or less nailed it. People are choosing to do this to themselves, not being forced to.

Re:Telescreen

[Opportunist]

And just like with Brave New World, some people actually see the dystopian future as utopian.

Re:the hell!?

[Rei]

1) I love datasets. If I decide later that I want to, say, check how long it usually takes me to drive from Point A to Point B, or see if I noticed an earthquake on a particular day or really bloody anything I think up later, I want the data.

2) I like being able to look up things about my past. E.g., a coworker says "Oh, hey, I don't see you signed in on July 6th - do you know why?" I can go back and see "Oh yeah, I was sick then" or "I was in, but I was in a rush because of A and B and forgot to sign in" or "Oh yeah, I took a day of vacation then, did the vacation registration not go through?"

3) Sometimes my memory isn't great. It's great to have an "artificial memory" that never forgets

4) The inevitable "He said" / "she said" argument. You have proof right on-hand. Prove it to yourself first, and if you're right, prove it to the other person.

5) Contextualizing the past. Why do people take pictures or videos of major events? To remember and revisit them later. Why not have as much data as you can for those past events?

6) Rescue. If your phone logs everything to the cloud, and you have it set up so that friends or family members can access it in an emergency, it makes it a lot more likely that you'll be found.

7) Crime. I used to be on Google Latitude, but there was a couple month period in which I was using a phone in which it wasn't enabled, and during that period I was a victim of a crime in a place I wasn't familiar with. It was extreme difficult for me to find the location where it occurred. Full logging would not only have recorded the location, but also all of the details to prove its existence.

And on and on and on.

What I don't understand is why so many of you are afraid of logging yourselves. What the heck are you doing that you're so terrified of governments hacking into your data and stealing it?