Our lives are littered with devices we don’t understand. We don’t know why the microwave suddenly beeps just past midnight, or why the dishwasher won’t run unless it’s been unplugged and then replugged three times, or why the laptop charges only when we push in the cord at that weird angle.
Sometimes it seems like these questions are simply impossible to answer, preternatural quirks that can be fixed solely by calling a professional. Or these days, by opening up the ChatGPT app.
Consumer AI tools are enabling more and more people to conduct their own device evaluations and repairs. The internet is filled with posts and videos of people documenting attempts at repairs on everything from phones to ovens to even fridges with the help of AI. Instead of calling a repair person, many people are simply turning to chatbots to field their questions and reassemble their broken appliances.
Indeed, these tools can quickly mine the internet for repair manuals, propose diagnostics, and distill instructions into step-by-step guidance. iFixIt, which has assembled tens of thousands of repair guides, has even launched its own AI tool meant to guide people in these DIY projects.
But the era of AI-empowered repair also introduces new, fraught dynamics. AI, of course, does not get everything right. The technology makes mistakes, and still seems to struggle with understanding the physical world (that includes appliances).
More broadly, AI-guided repairs stand to exacerbate ongoing tensions over the right to repair, a consumer movement pushing companies to make it easier for customers to rehabilitate their own devices. That movement comes amid intense pushback from industry heavyweights like Apple and tractor firm John Deere that are determined to keep repairs of their products in-house.
I experienced this tension when attempting to fix my dishwasher. The appliance was long out of warranty, and the issue—a faulty logic board—would cost as much as $500 to fix, according to a diagnostic assessment. But after realizing the cost of that logic board part was just about $100 bucks, I canceled the appointment with the professional repair person and went about fixing the device myself. Then I turned to ChatGPT.
This was by no means easy. I, and then ChatGPT, discovered that a device manual documenting where the control board is located had never been uploaded to the internet, and that no official manufacturer documents even discussed where the component I needed to replace might be.
Instead, I unscrewed different sections of the dishwasher, one by one, searching for the logic board and sending pictures to ChatGPT. Over a few hours, the bot and I collectively guessed our way through the innards of the appliance.
No doubt, the bot’s well-observed sycophancy confused the process. Sometimes, ChatGPT would seem to base guesses on manuals for other models, and then apologize for getting it wrong. Multiple times, it tried to give up and direct me to a manufacturer.
Still, I persisted, documenting each step and uploading pictures to the bot. Finally, deep inside the dishwasher, I found the internal box container for the logic board and replaced the part. Suddenly, I had fixed my dishwasher myself—something I might never have dared before.
Obviously, companies do not want you to do this. There are implicit safety issues, such as electric shock and flood risks, among other things, to worry about. But there are financial motivations, too. People with broken devices who can’t fix them on their own must either pay for repairs or buy new ones.
“Given that many large manufacturers were already anti-repair, I would think that this will incentivize these manufacturers to try to further lock down repair information,” says University of Nevada, Las Vegas, law professor Leah Chan Grinvald, who focuses on the intersection of intellectual property and right-to-repair law.
Some states now have laws guaranteeing the right to repair, including New York, Oregon, and Colorado. But in states where that right isn’t yet protected, companies have lobbied heavily to forestall progress. Automakers, phone companies, and medical device makers are just some that have bristled at the idea of letting people fix their stuff on their own, and even tried to make it harder.
But as University of Michigan law professor Aaron Perzanowski predicts, “If device makers try to lock down repair information even further, they are going to have to contend with state right-to-repair laws that now protect about a third of Americans from these sorts of anti-consumer and anti-competitive tactics.”