They’re like the Razzies, but for technology. This week, the list of “Worst in Show” gadgets was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show, and artificial intelligence dominated these dark depths.
According to the Public Interest Research Group, the “Worst in Show” Awards debuted at CES in 2021. On its “Worst in Show” site “calling out the most troubling trends in tech,” the CES (held this Tuesday through Friday in Las Vegas, Nev.) said it was created to “draw attention to the least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable gadgets” at the show.
Repair.org – a repair industry trade association – announced the official list, as reported here on the iFixit blog. Categories included: overall worst in show, people’s choice, who asked for this?, ens***tification (where products and services get worse over time), repairability, environmental impact, security and privacy.
Samsung’s Family Hub Smart Fridge was deemed the worst in not one but two categories – overall worst and repairability. Described on the Samsung website as a fridge with “AI Vision Inside” that “recognizes select fresh foods that you put in and take out of your fridge,” it might give millennials flashbacks to the 1999 Disney Channel Original Movie “Smart House”.
Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, awarded the fridge with the overall worst distinction and empathized “the mismatch between what a fridge is for and what this fridge demands from users.” While it does have features that other fridges don’t, the judges argued that “voice control, fragile actuators, connectivity dependencies, and ad-driven ‘sponsored content’ creates new ways for a core household appliance to fail, frustrate, and become uneconomical to service.”
As for the award for worst repairability, Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit, cited “an overengineered design that adds failure points without delivering meaningful durability or serviceability.” He also noted that what should be a basic kitchen appliance becomes unnecessarily complicated with the add-ons.
“I would not trust a Samsung fridge farther than I could throw it,” he said of the appliance, which sells for around $3,499 on the Samsung website.
Samsung’s ambitious fridge wasn’t the only AI-associated pick on the list. Lepro Ami AI Companion – marketed as a “soulmate” – was selected by the public as the people’s choice pick for worst gadget. If the fridge brings “Smart House” to mind, this one seems to evoke Spike Jonze’s “Her” from 2013.
“Though the device comes with a physical camera shutter, people were unsettled by the idea of a desktop camera and microphone marketed as ‘always on,’” said iFixit.
Bosch’s 800 Series Personal AI Barista was also awarded the “who asked for this?” title. Justin Brookman, director of technology policy for Consumer Reports, gave the elaborate coffee-maker this award for “injecting voice assistants, subscriptions, and planned feature decay into something people mostly want to operate before their brain turns on.”
While that’s linked to ens***tification, the winner of that category wasn’t AI, it was Bosch’s eBike Flow App. Environmental impact was the only other category that didn’t go to AI, actually. It went to Lollipop Star, a single use candy lollipop with built-in electronics that transmit sound through jaw vibrations, marketed as “music you can taste.”
Amazon Ring AI was awarded worst in privacy by Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF cited its expansion of the “reach and ambition of consumer surveillance,” with new capabilities such as “facial recognition, deployable mobile surveillance towers, and an app ecosystem that could invite even more invasive third-party features.”
Finally, Merach UltraTread Treadmill with AI Fitness Trainer was awarded worst security by Paul Roberts, President of the Secure Resilient Future Foundation. He chose the fitness equipment for its internet connectivity, sensors, and large language model features collecting sensitive data such as biometrics and behavioral inference.
“What pushed Merach over the line was the company’s own admission in its privacy policy: ‘We cannot guarantee the security of your personal information,’” he said. “For products designed to live on home networks and gather high-value data, Roberts argued that this is not an acceptable baseline.”
Many major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, have been focused on investing in artificial intelligence in recent years and the program ChatGPT has become more popular. However, there are concerns related to the technology, such as concerns over its potential sentience, AI providing wrong answers in search results, harmful conversations with AI chatbots and AI impacting the job market. These awards also demonstrate another concern – AI potentially making simple things more complicated than they need to be.