You're pretty wrong on all of those points. Take bodybuilders for example. Most bodybuilders track number of reps daily because if they're not progressively overloading, they're not making progress. It also tells them when to take a deload week.
Track your meals for a week or two and you'll see the actual calories and macros are pretty far from what you might think in your mind. When you're doing a lean bulk and shooting for a +250 calorie surplus, how in the world are you supposed to actually know you're around a +250 calorie surplus without tracking? It would be almost impossible to know your actually TDEE without counting calories for a few weeks or months.
Nothing is "fattening", because you can lose fat while eating any one thing. You can lose weight while only eating lasagna, thus, it is not necessarily fattening. But in general I agree, saying "I ate lasagna" could be 400 calories, or it could be 2400 calories.
However, a calorie estimating AI could be useful if it indicates a level of uncertainty. You list "lasagna", and the AI estimates it's 1200 calories, plus or minus 1000, or something like that. Maybe this level of accuracy is good enough for some people, and it makes tracking and losing weight easy. Or maybe you're not losing weight, and so you realize you have to be more specific, listing the food weights and individual ingredients, etc.
in my opinion that is adding AI for the sake of AI. If you're making homemade lasagna it takes a minute to add the ingredients you used to get a very accurate calorie count. There's really no way AI can do it better and more accurate.
Truth is though, I often skip logging calories because it's a PITA to do it. I have to scan the package, but I already threw the package away or it's dirty or covered in blood. I have to weigh things, but the food scale is in the other room, and I already mixed the ingredients. It's just a lot of extra steps to log calories using the currently available apps; I don't think I've ever logged a meal with less than 20 clicks. Removing small annoyances like this is what good apps are made of.
I agree with you, logging calories manually sucks, especially if you’re preparing whole foods. But how does adding AI into the mix solve the issue? E.g. it seems unlikely to me that we’ll ever get to the point of snapping a picture of a home cooked meal and getting accurate calories, maybe that’s where I’m being shortsighted?
