“AI” is certainly a turn-off for me, I would ask a salesman “do you have one that doesn’t have that?” and I will now enumerate why:

1. LLMs are wrongness machines. They do have an almost miraculous ability to string words together to form coherent sentences but when they have no basis at all in truth it’s nothing but an extremely elaborate and expensive party trick. I don’t want actual services like web searches replaced with elaborate party tricks.

2. In a lot of cases it’s being used as a buzzword to mean basically anything computer controlled or networked. Last time I looked up they were using the word “smart” to mean that. A clothes dryer that can sense the humidity of the exhaust air to know when the clothes are dry isn’t any more “AI” than my 90’s microwave that can sense the puff of steam from a bag of popcorn. This is the kind of outright dishonest marketing I’d like to see fail so spectacularly that people in the advertising business go missing over it.

3. I already avoided “smart” appliances and will avoid “AI” appliances for the same reasons: The “smart” functionality doesn’t actually run locally, it has to connect to a server out on the internet to work, which means that while that server is still up and offering support to my device, I have a hole in my firewall. And then they’ll stop support ten minutes after the warranty expires and the device will no longer work. For many of these devices there’s no reason the “smart” functionality couldn’t run locally on some embedded ARM chip or talk to some application running on a PC that I own inside my firewall, other than “then we don’t get your data.”

4. AI is apparently consuming more electricity than air conditioning. In fact, I’m not convinced that power consumption isn’t the selling point they’re pushing at board meetings. “It’ll keep our friends in the pollution industry in business.”