Fedex: AI object detection makes things worse.

AI doesn't do what the marketing material says it does.

I’ve been using AI for programming for about 6 months and gave up on it. The AI does not solve my problems. Here are some of the problems I found with AI and programming Python:

1. It uses old modules that are no longer in use.

2. The code just doesn’t work.

3. You have to be really specific for many tasks. Such as “make this work in a web app”. If you don’t mention the web app it won’t work with a web app.

ChatGPT now has an AI LLM (large language model) just for Python now but I haven’t tested it. I have the free ChatGPT account. There are also AI extensions for Visual Code Studio which is a fancy editor for programmers. These AI extensions are supposed to be able to write code but I haven’t tested those either.

I have also used AI to help me answer questions about Power BI (a Microsoft report writer) which did not help at all. Microsoft even has an AI user (not labeled as such) in their forum and it repeatedly gave me a wrong outdated answer even when I told it the answer was outdated. So that AI could not learn from my feedback.

Fedex AI object detection

Now on to the problems with Fedex AI object detection. Fedex uses object detection in their computers to scan boxes moving quickly down a conveyor belt. The problem is when 2 boxes (which are each labeled with the normal size category, which determines shipping charges) are close to each other, the object detection detects one single box, looks at the single scanned code (ignoring the other code on the other label), and says “This is an oversize box and we need to charge you more.”

So with this error we get 1-2 packages a week where the correct charge was $14 and Fedex charges us $1500 for shipping because of bad object detection where 2 normal size packages were seen as one oversized package.

We have a person whose job it is to look up and fix incorrect Fedex charges, which takes them about 6 hours every week. When using Fedex you will need to plan for this extra expense.