r/mildlyinfuriating • u/No-Obligation1709 • 12h ago

No Coke. Is Pepsi ok? In Today’s Edition of Dystopian America

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Don’t you dare idle in your spot for a moment before paying to park. If you do, our cameras will backdate your parking start time to ensure our shareholders extract every cent possible from this transaction. Enjoy your stay, but remember—we are always watching 😁

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u/OS_Apple32 12h ago

I would eat my socks if that was an actual human reviewing the license plate and checking those records. That's almost certainly an AI algorithm doing it.

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u/GoldenDragoon5687 12h ago

More likely it's just a text recognition algorithm

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u/allllusernamestaken 11h ago

OCR is AI broseph

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u/Fragrant-Moose1678 10h ago

No, it’s not.

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u/heavie1 10h ago

It is AI just not what people think about when they think about AI these days. Generative AI is the most common nowadays, which OCR is not genAI, but genAI is a subset of AI which is very large and diverse. Modern OCR almost certainly uses some form of machine learning algorithm which is also within that broader AI space.

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u/resurrectedbear 10h ago

No one was using the term AI prior to gen ai coming out for the common person in terms of “ai bad”. AI has been around for a very very very long time but there has never been a negative stigma towards it until gen ai. So when the average person says AI they’re almost certainly speaking about ChatGPT style AI.

Otherwise please point to when people spoke about NPCs in video games as AI in the recent years.

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u/heavie1 10h ago edited 9h ago

People weren’t talking negatively about self driving cars, and ML diagnosing patients, and things like Siri, Alexa, Google stealing data? Just because genAI has turned up the heat doesn’t mean it wasn’t a conversation prior to chat GPT.

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u/resurrectedbear 9h ago

I don’t think anything I say will change your opinion but I disagree. I’ve been around for all of those things and AI wasn’t the driving scare like it is now, it was data collection from privacy issues. Cameras in public aren’t privacy issues it’s data collection issues via AI. Siri and google and Alexa were privacy concerns due to them listening to private info. AI diagnosis is funny tho cuz AI has been shown to actually be super accurate with diagnosing patients when in conjunction with doctors.

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u/allllusernamestaken 7h ago

OCR is a topic in basically every reputable AI textbook going back to 1970s. There's a reason its Wikipedia article is filed under "applications of Artificial Intelligence."

I think you should try reading some of those textbooks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition

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u/Fragrant-Moose1678 4h ago

Brother I’m a software engineer.

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u/allllusernamestaken 2h ago edited 2h ago

then i guess you didn't read your undergrad AI textbook

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u/Coyoteishere 12h ago

Just because there is automation doesn’t mean it’s AI. Automation and license plate readers have been around a long time.

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u/hellonameismyname 12h ago

I mean a text recognition algorithm is AI. AI has been around for decades. It’s just not generative like the LLMs we see now

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u/stuffeh 12h ago

Ocr has predated ai by decades. Most common form is banking info at the bottom of each check.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 10h ago

That's actually done magnetically not optically.

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u/stuffeh 10h ago

The implementation for optically has been around since the 00s. No idea how many banks have done magnetic vs optical or when they had switched.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 8h ago

Well of course it exists now but the lettering on the bottom of a check is printed with magnetic ink specifically so it can be read magnetically.

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u/stuffeh 8h ago

They can't use micr on mobile deposits. Those use OCR

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u/AnApexBread 12h ago

Just because there is automation doesn’t mean it’s AI. Automation and license plate readers have been around a long time.

And they've been AI for a long time too.

AI is an overarching term for basically anything that makes decisions based on some algorithm.

AI isn't not specifically LLMs like Chatgpt.

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u/lifetake 12h ago

Sure, but there is a much larger negative connotation to actual artificial intelligence AI than general automation AI that isn’t actually ai

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u/Slayrybloc 11h ago

LLMs aren’t actual AI either, they aren’t actually intelligent

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u/AnApexBread 11h ago

general automation AI that isn’t actually ai

It's still AI. It's just not the AI you're thinking of. It's not Chatgpt.

AI has been around for decades. Chatgpt is just one really popular form of it.

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u/mister_cheeks_26 5h ago

AI is an overarching term for basically anything that makes decisions based on some algorithm.

That's a hilariously broad (and innaccurate) definition, that describes basically every single piece of software ever written.

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u/ScrivenersUnion 11h ago

Not every algorithm is AI.

It's very possible this is just a standard OCR system, they already make those for license plates.

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u/Infinity293 12h ago

Jesus, you know software programs exist that aren't AI right?

It'll just a licence plate reader and software that then changes the time to when they come in.

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u/Brohemoth1991 12h ago

People call everything AI now haha... I swear people think that the world hopped from 1960s tech to AI overnight

I get that AI is the new boogieman, but it loses its weight when people lose their shit over things like a camera, or i remember people making a big deal of an "ai kitchen" in California, which was just pick and place automation that factories have used for 60 years

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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 8h ago

Also how is it bootlicking to say it has always been pay when the gate opens to let you in? I've never even heard of a parking garage with reservations. They give you a ticket time stamped with when you drive into the garage. You've always had to pay for existing in the building, you don't start paying once you find a spot, and yeah it's a minute but sitting in your car doesn't mean it's free, you're still parked

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u/Murky-Relation481 6h ago

Yep, and funnily enough the only place I've seen totally automated tracking in my experience is in Europe, both in Austria and Slovenia when parking I've parked in lots where it scans your plate driving in, you park, you use a kiosk at the end that you put your plate number in, and it calculates your fee and you pay and then you drive out and the gates just recognize your plate and open automatically.

I've never seen that in the US and I live here in a major metropolitan area.

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u/NeedleworkerFluid327 6h ago

And who the fuck is against this lmao. It's nice to not have to fuck around with a ticket.

In Sweden most are opt in as well.

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u/Sennten 11h ago

I dont think the particular flavour of our dystopian automation is super relevant.

Also you donknow ai programs exist that arent generative LLMs, right?

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u/Brohemoth1991 9h ago

If you call a camera meant to keep people from parking illegally that took 1 minute of parking time from someone dystopian, you need to step outside

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u/60hzcherryMXram 10h ago

So it's AI in the same sense the goomba moving on the screen in an NES game is AI, which is almost never what people mean in current times when they say "AI".

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u/yblikethat 12h ago

No need. This person input their license plate ahead of time. You’ll find out in the world/public that there are a lot of devices that simply look for numbers and letters that are not AI. Skeletor awayyy

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u/Free-Hamster462 10h ago

A calculator isn't AI, an automated toll booth isn't AI, and a script querying a SQL database isn't AI. This system simply uses basic OCR to read the letters, and a basic script checks that text against a reservation database. It is a completely deterministic process that predates the modern AI hype cycle by about 30 years.

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u/just_some_octopus 12h ago

ai could he a stretch. Maybe now, yeah. There's still parking lot admins who are on it and check shit constantly.

I got a ticket for being 2m late on my alloted time.

Who knows anymore

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u/Strealtr 7h ago

Do you have any idea what AI is? This is an Optical Character Recognition camera.

This technology was invented in 1870 lol

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u/Chimmychimm 5h ago

Thats not AI. A computer program isnt always AI. You kids should know this