Anyone use AI in regards to their yo-yos, or in their collection pursuits?
I hadn’t logged in in a month or two. I’ve been running different experiments for fun with all the AI clients that have been coming out. Got a little outa hand with it 
Me and Claude have been restoring my dads old 86’ BMW R series.
Anyways, hope all yall are well. Any wild AI stories? I swear, sometimes their replies are… alarming. 
I use AI in my yoyo app to parse links and text to fill in yoyo details. I have also used it to get price comps across multiple BSTs and sites.
I generally just use my human brain for yoyos.
I feel ya. I don’t really use them together either, but I have been playing round with them a bit. Def seems to be the norm today. 
HB>AI
Yes.
I’ve used it to search Japanese/Chinese sources as I was curious what is popular and highly regarded amongst players over there.. because I can’t read these languages and I didn’t know where the discussions in these countries are taking place.
I’ve used it to locate a yoyo that seemed to be out of stock everywhere I manually looked/searched.
I’ve also fed it the characteristics/properties that I enjoy in a yoyo and it was able to give me recommendations. Surprisingly, it tried to recommend some of the yoyo’s that I already love. So, I refined things and got some extra/good recommendations. This use case is nice for me because I want to try new yoyos but I don’t have easy access to meets/contests/clubs/other-players that would allow me to try out a lot of different throws… so I often have to resort to buying things just to try them.. which is an endeavor that almost always results in a loss.
To quote the great @JeiCheetah:
KEEP AI OUT OF YOYO
Isn’t that more in regards to AI-created artwork that is used for products/branding?
It is a slippery slope, and I’m staying off of it. I messed with AI when it was first hitting the public scene with stuff like Crayon, and it was fun and silly. Now it is 90% awful and I want nothing to do with it.
The ONLY use of AI that I have personally seen that was any good was for a friend of mine who lost his voice to MS to be able to generate a replica of his own voice to communicate with friends and family.
I mean, I get it. As a data engineer, I have the “AI Sword of Damocles” looming over my head. If I could choose a world without AI then I absolutely would (for my own selfish reasons, I admit).
That being said, I think there’s levels to the use cases of AI. I hesitate to blanket ban AI from anything yoyo-related when I cannot think of many detrimental use cases other than:
(a) displacing artists – I agree, we should not tolerate that
(b) the general fact that prompting AI further propagates AI – I think AI is so massive and yoyo is so niche that even if we had skynet, I am failing to see how it will effect yoyo specifically.
I want to ask the next question honestly. I’m not trying to be argumentative. I’ll even pre-concede that I am probably overlooking major points regarding this discussion…but, outside of the two points above, how else is AI threatening the yoyo world specifically?
You should watch the video that Emmet posted on IG yesterday about his videos being stolen and edited to show other people doing his tricks.
The way I see it (I am not a data engineer) we didn’t (as far as I know) use AI ten years ago. If you wanted to do something you just had to know how to do it, and if you didn’t know how to do it you had to learn how to do it. Good lord I am old man yelling at clouds right now.
Art, music, and generally anything that previously required some level of skill is now open for anyone with a computer to just churn out endless low quality slop.
Jobs and tasks that generally don’t require a ton of skill are just being replaced by AI taking so much human to human interaction out of life. Its miserable. Like just let me buy a burger from a person.
I wanted to catalogue my yo-yo collection. So I took photos of every single one of them (up to 794) made a spread sheet, and researched each individual one that I wanted to list more details on. It takes time. It takes research skills. It takes knowing who to ask about extremely niche things.
Take a photo of a yo-yo you want to identify and run it through google ai image search and tell me if it give you the correct answer. Spoiler alert, it wont.
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My take on that is I can do the research and have done it in the past. But if I have a tool that allows me to enjoy my hobby and spend more time with my kids I am going to use it. Not for creative work but for needlessly tedious work. I have a robot vacuum to keep that tedium away so why not AI to find specs for some obscure yoyo that was made 15 years ago?
Just wait till said vacuum becomes self aware and starts communicating with skynet.
Claude Code is amazing for personal projects that I wouldn’t bother making if it required any real effort lol
I like that I can get a proof of concept made with only half of an idea and no planning.
Thank you, that is a good example. It sounds like something we should be aware of. And I’d definitely be interested in watching it – could you possibly link me?
To my point about there being levels to the use cases, I think we should be aware of the harmful use cases. It is helpful to describe/document them and make them known. Then, as a community we can keep our eyes out out and condemn them when they occur.. so they stop occurring (hopefully, lol). Like as you mentioned, when people’s videos are stolen. Not cool.
I just don’t think there’s a lot of foul play involved with using AI as a tool for yoyo research purposes. I have found quite a bit of benefit from it and I don’t think it is hurting anyone. If anything, it has caused me to make more purchases which helps the yoyo stores, haha. There can be some upside.
And I agree, I would rather buy my burger from a human.
Back in my days we had to use LEGS to get to places. If you wanted to go somewhere you just had to spread your legs and use strength. And NOW, people just use car slop which doesn’t even work in houses or anywhere narrow and it creates so much risk for people. Like, just let me walk OMG
Cars have also replaced so many jobs it’s crazy! Horse-drawn transportation, animal-powered infrastructure, carriage, and wagon makers, they all have to starve to death because of some stupid metal box slop!
Try asking the car to drive in a highschool hallway. Spoiler alert, it wont.
Use your legs.
Never used a.i. or chatted with it. I dislike computers other than playing video games, which is an occasional escape. I feel like we peaked in 2005 and this crap is just electronic parlor tricks and overly confident encyclopedias. I hear there is a social media site(moltbook?) where all the a.i. get together and talk. Wonder if yoyo ever comes up in thier conversations
instead of dunking on AI (a necessary hobby on the internet these days), i would recommend people check out kagi if they want to use a search engine that doesn’t advertise to them or surface 10 AI written articles, it’s cheaper than an AI subscription and has netted me a lot of benefit (and I work in cybersecurity, so it’s not like using AI is foreign for the things i’m using a search engine for)
for people who want to ask questions and get recommendations i’d highly recommend just posting on the forum! tons of people here have been yoyoing for decades and can give you interesting insight and recommendations that aren’t just from the top 5 most popular brands
also go to club and ask people to try their yoyos!
imo yoyoing is a hobby i would’ve probably faded away from if it wasn’t for the human element
