HP Is Adding AI To Its Printers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld, written by Michael Crider: The latest perpetrator of questionable AI branding? HP. The company is introducing 'Print AI,' what it calls the 'industry's first intelligent print experience for home, office, and large format printing.' What does that mean? It's essentially a new beta software driver package for some HP printers. According to the press release, it can deliver 'Perfect Output' -- capital P capital O -- a branded tool that reformats the contents of a page in order to more ideally fit it onto physical paper.

Despite my skeptical tone, this is actually a pretty cool idea. 'Perfect Output can detect unwanted content like ads and web text, printing only the desired text and images, saving time, paper, and ink.' That's neat! If the web page you're printing doesn't offer a built-in print format, the software will make one for you. It'll also serve to better organize printed spreadsheets and images, too. But I don't see anything in this software that's actually AI -- or even machine learning, for that matter. This is applying the same tech (functionally, if not necessarily the same code) as the 'reader mode' formatting we've seen in browsers for about a decade now. Take the text and images of a page, strip out everything else that's unnecessary, and present it as efficiently as possible.

The press release does mention that support and formatting tasks can be accomplished with 'simple conversational prompts,' which at least might be leveraging some of the large language models that have become synonymous with AI as consumers understand it. But based on the description, it's more about selling you something than helping you. 'Customers can choose to print or explore a curated list of partners that offer unique photo printing capabilities, gift certificates to be printed on the card, and so much more.' Whoopee.

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