A thesis on consumer AI — what it should be, what's missing, and what we're building with Osaurus.
How Artificial Intelligence Constrains the Human Experience
AbstractArtificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies are transforming many consumption activities, powering breakthroughs that expand the human experience by enhancing human capabilities, performance, and creativity. While this explains the consumer enthusiasm and rapid adoption of these technologies, AI systems can also have the opposite effect: reducing and constraining the range of experiences that are available to consumers. This article examines the mechanisms through which AI can constrain the human experience, considering individual, interpersonal, and societal processes. Our analysis uncovers a complex interplay between the advantages of AI and its inadvertent negative repercussions, which potentially restrict human autonomy, self-identity, relational dynamics, and social behavior. In this article, we propose three different mechanisms at the core of these constraining forces: parametric reductionism, agency transference, and regulated expression. Our exploration of these mechanisms highlights the risks connected to system design and points to questions and implications for future researchers and policymakers.
Agents First
Every product is getting a second customer — the human who pays, and the agent who decides. A design framework for building products that AI agents can use as primary consumers.
Consumer Reports unveils 'Consumer Finance AI Standard' a first-of-its-kind framework defining what consumers are owed from AI-powered financial products
Washington, DC – Consumer Reports today published the Consumer Finance AI Standard, a first-of-its-kind framework defining the rights, protections, and design practices consumers are owed…
Future - The AI Tipping Point
Learn more about the latest advancements in the field of artificial intelligence over the last six months, from new innovative AI tools and services to how these are shaping consumers' online behavior.
The Obvious Case for Open and Local AI — Osaurus
AI is a step change in what one person can do—but the power is being rented back to us. Here's the case for intelligence you can run, inspect, and keep.
The Consumer AI Revolution Won’t Be Technical. It’ll Be Emotional.
In technology, the obvious revolutions often come last.
The GenAI Future of Consumer Research
Abstract We develop a novel generative AI (GenAI) trajectory, “democratization-average trap-model collapse,” to identify data and model challenges posed by GenAI, from which we project the GenAI future of consumer research. This trajectory consists of three key phenomena: democratization broadens consumer participation, the average trap produces generic responses, and model collapse occurs when GenAI outputs lose human sensibilities. Data and model challenges arise as democratization enhances data representation while also embedding real-world biases. The average trap, caused by next-token prediction models, leads to generic outputs that lack individuality. Additionally, model collapse occurs when GenAI increasingly learns from its own outputs, amplifying machine bias and diverging from human behavior. To address these challenges, researchers can leverage democratization to study marginalized consumers and prioritize human-centered research over purely data-driven methods. The average trap can be mitigated by fine-tuning models with task-specific and marginalized consumption data while engineering responses for uniqueness. Preventing model collapse requires integrating human–machine hybrid data and applying theories of mind to realign AI with human-centric consumption. Finally, we outline three future research directions: preserving data distribution tails to support consumption democratization, countering the average trap in next-token prediction, and reversing the trajectory from democratization to model collapse.
AI's Economics Don't Make Sense
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osaurus/docs/AGENT_DB.md at main · osaurus-ai/osaurus
Own your AI. The native macOS harness for AI agents -- any model, persistent memory, autonomous execution, cryptographic identity. Built in Swift. Fully offline. Open source. - osaurus-ai/osaurus
Mark Zuckerberg's AI manifesto is exactly why people don't like AI | TechCrunch
On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto about personal AI, largely about the possibilities for the "personal superintelligence" systems Meta AI is building.
AI Is Too Expensive
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Study Finds Consumers Are Actively Turned Off by Products That Use AI
Researchers have found that including the words "artificial intelligence" in product marketing is a major turn-off for consumers.
The AI Industry Is Losing
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AI as Social Technology
Our debates about ‘AI’ grow out of 1990s science fiction. Back then, Vinge (1993) wrote essays and novels urging us to face up to the oncoming “Singularity”: a moment of rapid change that would fundamentally transform the human condition. On that day, AI would rapidly evolve from merely human-level intelligence, what some now call ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI), into something super-intelligent with its own interests and goals. Humanity would then either be casually eliminated by out-of-control machines, or humans would become as gods, with super-human servitors at our command.
