- At WWDC, Apple unveiled “Apple Intelligence.”
- It will power useful and friendly features like being able to prioritize notifications.
- It's a lighter, less scary version of AI. This is for common people.
Does AI make you stupid? If it doesn't, a small part of you wonders… Shouldn't it be? Will AI replace you at your job? Will it enable state-run disinformation campaigns? Will artificial general intelligence ignite some kind of World War III scenario that leads to the destruction of the human race, as some AI doomers think? Will it ask you to eat glue?
Don't worry—Apple is here to assuage your fears of big bad AI, give you a cup of warm milk, tuck you into your cozy bed, and cuddle you until you fall asleep. Stroke the hair. In a keynote presentation for its annual developer conference on Monday, Apple finally unveiled its AI intentions.
Unlike Google's recent event that showcased futuristic things like AI search results (which caused embarrassment) or the OpenAI keynote in May – which featured a voice-over similarity of the company's voice assistant to Scarlett Johansson's voice. led to scandal, and where its technological capabilities seemed strange and strange – Apple's demonstration was familiar and practical, as you can really do use.
(One couldn't help but feel that Apple actually had real Scarlett Johansson in her keynote — in clips from her upcoming Apple TV+ movie “Fly Me to the Moon.”
It's not 'artificial intelligence', it's 'Apple Intelligence'
And in Apple's new AI world, we start with one rule: don't call it “artificial intelligence.” This is “Apple Intelligence”.
What's the difference, you ask? Hahaha! Don't worry about the details or Apple's contract with OpenAI! Focus only on the good, happy things it can do.
Apple Intelligence can perform simple and useful tasks. One demo involved someone needing to pick up their mother from the airport. Siri can retrieve flight details from email, pull up tracking, and look up lunch reservation details that were sent in text. Helpful! Not scary!
Another feature is in the Mail app. Apple is not suggesting that it can write email for you. Rather, it can help you revise the email in a different tone. (Options include “professional,” “brief,” or “friendly.”)
Apple is giving you creative AI baby steps here – not trying to suggest it can do the work of humans, just brush it off a bit.
It will also be able to organize your emails into categories: Basic, Transactional, Updates, or Promotions, which is great (but also … Gmail has been doing this for a decade). Additionally, it will use AI to prioritize your notifications and allow you to enable a “minimize notifications” mode (ah, yes!).
Apple Intelligence wasn't brainstorming.
Still, like the AI version of Memoji, some of the other generative stuff was purely silly/cute. With this tool, you can make a cartoon picture of your friend to wish them a happy birthday. This is really stupid. Please know that if you send me one of your creative Memoji, we are now enemies.
These are small additions, and many of them may already exist in other ways, such as recording and transcription of phone calls or photo editing tools to remove an object from the background of a photo. (Android users are probably laughing right now.)
Nothing was a completely new way of thinking or using. artificial Apple Intelligence. There was no “wow” feature or jaw-dropping moment. It was just a bunch of small, helpful things that would make iPhones and computers a little easier to do the things they already do.
AI for standards
And it's probably a good way to introduce AI to the iPhone-owning world of rules. People are – rightly – a bit skeptical about AI and worried about extreme development that could harm humanity. And with that, Apple gets no embarrassingly bad results from AI-generated answers!
Apple, of course, was very proud to toss its own privacy rules over its competitors – clearly suggesting that you can't trust other companies. (Okay, they might have a point there.)
And all of these new AI features will require the iPhone 15 or the upcoming 16 when it launches later this year. Which of course leads to the question: Would any of these new AI features make you want to upgrade your phone?