Strava new AI feature

Anyone else noticed Stravas new Athlete Intelligence feature?

Gives a round up of your ride performances. It’s showing for all my outdoor rides but not for my TrainerRoad workouts unfortunately.

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It’s the talk of the town on a lot of forums. Not for how good it is. The best description I’ve seen it called is “Captain Hindsight”. There’s quite a number of amusing posts over on Strava Reddit where it has completely missed the mark or told someone they’re going to have a strong 2023, etc.

For whatever reason they’ve switched on this “AI” system that attempts to humanize this analysis in a summary that I don’t think anyone has asked for. Strava provides some really useful tools/features to track how we’re going ourselves. The social aspect is also one of the strengths of the platform. Having their ‘AI’ give us some soulless (and often incorrect) feedback looks to be a complete waste of time. Thankfully it’s easy to switch off and opt-out.

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I’ve found it gives a decent high level description of the ride. It adds nothing to my own interpretation of the data or impressions. It merely feels like something that was hatched a year ago when companies felt compelled to do anything AI. The result is underwhelming and I’ll switch it off soon if it just becomes a distraction.

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Haven’t seen anything on my activities, but heard them talking about it on the Spin Cycle podcast on Escape. If some AI tries to make me feel better by telling me I am “older and heavier, but hey, nice job”, they are gonna get a cancellation notice as soon as my old heavy ass can hit the cancel button. :crazy_face:

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It’s bound to have glitches it’s just been released. I thought it looked decent for a summary at first glance. Just getting on with second week of the Autumn/Winter Turbo plan and was thinking be handy for TrainerRoad workouts to see if you were making power improvements. Strava has plenty of data they could feed it.

The summaries I’ve had were accurate enough and it’s kind of neat, with a big emphasis on the “kind of”. But like a lot of these things, it seems more like a party trick than something I needed or wanted. Same for the code generation tools I’ve used as a software developer too. Kind of cool, but ultimately not very useful for me.

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I’m like 90% sure that all it does is take some of the activity data and make a single API call to ChatGPT to summarize it and that’s it. The whole thing feels like an intern project that got shipped to production.

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Use strata ai to fill out TrainerRoad post ride survey. Got it!

Joe

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Hit a big hole in the road in the dark. Pinch flat. Made note in Strava. Strava tells me I should check my equipment more carefully before a ride.
Funny

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Implementing that AI feature reminds me of something some folks have said in other contexts: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”

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Just saw that this feature appears to be only in the app whereas I usually access Strava via a browser……but now I see it in my app.

Hard “meh”….just seems like generic ChatGPT crap. Nothing I’m gonna bother to pay attention to…

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I can’t believe, presumably multiple people, sat around a table and thought that releasing & enabling this feature was a good idea. It’s abysmal.

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Every outdoor ride of mine since it was switched on has been “solid”

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Would be cool if some hacker redirected it to roastmystrava instead. :popcorn:

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The comments in this thread are brutal

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Very verbose commentator on things I already new. AI is only good if it is an assistant to make my decisions easier towards achieving a certain goal. This doesn’t help. It’s a feature for the sake of everyone having AI now.

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My general opinion on AI is that for a lot of what we’re seeing it’s a waste of engineering resources, time, and a large amount of money chasing a craze and in lots of cases being done because “well others are doing it, we have to!” or “the market demands it!”. Adding value and being useful is so far down the list of goals for it for many.

Not to say that there aren’t cases where it is actually proving to be useful and well done, but that is rare.

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I’d prefer a critically voiced AI provision in Strava.

“Three hours to ride fifty flat road miles? Pathetic.”

“You cut your ride short due to the rainy weather after 30miles…why not MTFU next time you useless PoS.”

And so forth.

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I don’t think it looks at enough data to actually be useful, it is really just a semi-interesting overview. Easy to ignore or just turn off.

The MTB event I did this past weekend is labeled as “Impressive mountain bike ride with high elevation gain, though your power output was lower than typical”. Except for the “Impressive” bit it is not really wrong…
But the detail that it is missing, is that the average temperature was 36 degrees C, and that the last 29km took me nearly 3h, almost double the time of the first 27km. Of that 3h about 50 minutes was spent not moving (one mechanical but mostly lying in what little shade I could find), and a further 22-ish minutes was spent moving very slowly uphill at 0 watts (ie. pushing).

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They think we’re idiots.