Logitech Launches An “AI” Mouse That’s Just A 2022 Mouse With A Mappable Button
“AI,” or semi-cooked language learning models are very cool. There’s a world of possibility there in terms of creativity and productivity tools to scientific research.
But early adoption of AI has been more of a rushed mess driven by speculative VC bros who are more interested in making money off of hype (see: pointless AI badges), or cutting corners (see: journalism), or badly automating already broken systems (see: health insurance) or using it as a bludgeon against labor (also see: journalism and media), than any sort of serious beneficial application.
And a lot of these kinds of folks are absolutely obsessed with putting “AI” into products that don’t need it just to generate hype. Even if the actual use case makes no coherent sense.
We most recently saw this with the Human AI pin, which was hyped as some kind of game changing revelation pre-release, only for reviewers to realize it doesn’t really work, and doesn’t really provide much not already accomplished by the supercomputer sitting in everybody’s pocket. But even that’s not as bad as companies who claim they’re integrating AI — despite doing nothing of the sort.
Like Logitech, which recently released a new M750 wireless mouse it has branded as a “signature AI edition.” But as Ars Technica notes, all they did is rebrand a mouse released in 2022 while adding a customizable button:
“I was disappointed to learn that the most distinct feature of the Logitech Signature AI Edition M750 is a button located south of the scroll wheel. This button is preprogrammed to launch the ChatGPT prompt builder, which Logitech recently added to its peripherals configuration app Options+.
That’s pretty much it.”
Ars points to other, similarly pointless ventures, like earbuds with clunky ChatGPT gesture prompt integration or Microsoft’s CoPilot button; stuff that only kind of works and nobody actually asked for. It’s basically just an attempt to seem futuristic and cash in on the hype wave without bothering to see if the actually functionality works or works better than what already exists.
The AI hype cycle isn’t entirely unlike the 5G hype cycle, in that there certainly is interesting and beneficial technology under the hood, but the way it’s being presented or implemented by overzealous marketing types is so detached from reality as to not be entirely coherent.
That creates an association over time in the minds of consumers between the technology and empty bluster, undermining the tech itself and future, actually beneficial use cases.
When bankers and marketing departments took over Silicon Valley it resulted in the actual engineers (like Woz) getting shoved in the corner out of sight. We’re now seeing such a severe disconnect between hype and reality it’s resulting in a golden age of bullshit artists and actively harming everybody in the chain, including the marketing folks absolutely convinced they’re being exceptionally clever.