• Butterbee (She/Her)@beehaw.org
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    5 months ago

    “fax machines are at odds with a world embracing artificial intelligence.” So bring on the fax machines! MORE fax machines!

    • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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      5 months ago

      I don’t see how that makes sense as a statement, an ai with access to a 56k modem can send a fax. It feels like they’re just using ai as a buzzword.

      • smeg@feddit.uk
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        5 months ago

        It reads to me more just as a statement of contrast, as in ‘we’re in a world of incredibly high-tech new technology, we shouldn’t still be using something from the Victorian era!’

      • denial@feddit.de
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        5 months ago

        Of cause that is a BS reason. But they should have stopped using fax machines 20 years ago. How can any reason they give why they have to stop now be any other than BS.

      • sweng@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        The issue is not sending, it is receiving. With a fax you need to do some OCR to extract the text, which you then can feed into e.g an AI.

          • sweng@programming.dev
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            5 months ago

            At horrendous expense, yes. Using it for OCR makes little sense. And compared to just sending the text directly, even OCR is expensive.

                • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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                  5 months ago

                  I wouldn’t do it on my phone. 🙄

                  What I’m saying is that it would probably be fairly easy to incorporate an already existing technology in to an AI.

            • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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              5 months ago

              I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.

              • GenosseFlosse@lemmy.nz
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                5 months ago

                OCR existed long before the 486. AFAIK it was already used in the 70’s or 80’s to scan mail and presort them based on the postcode. I remember that postcards had light orange boxes (presumably because this color was invisible to B/W scanners?) with dots inside where you where supposed to write the postcode numbers in.

                • sweng@programming.dev
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                  5 months ago

                  Doing OCR in a very specific format, in a small specific area, using a set of only 9 characters, and having a list of all possible results, is not really the same problem at all.

                • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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                  5 months ago

                  I meant OCR of arbitrary printed or faxed text, which really only became feasible for home users in the 1990s. There were professional, but often very limited, solutions earlier than that, of course.