The Era of Inescapable AI
Apple’s latest move normalizes the controversial technology.
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Earlier this week, Apple announced that it will soon lace its devices with generative AI, bringing “Apple Intelligence” to iPhones, iPads, and Macs later this year. Users will be able to allow the machine to write emails for them, create custom emoji and other synthetic illustrations, transcribe and summarize phone calls, and so on.
As my colleagues Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel described in a recent article for The Atlantic, “No single feature demonstrated today is new, exactly … But Apple is betting that its AI offering will be greater than the sum of its parts. Adding up iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Macs, and AirPods, billions of the company’s devices are used by people all over the world, perfect delivery vehicles for AI. The Apple announcement is the clearest sign that generative AI, foisted onto an enormous web of mainstream devices, will be essentially inescapable.”
Matteo and Charlie argue that the update will effectively turn Apple hardware into an “AI Trojan horse,” normalizing a technology that—while frequently fun and helpful—remains prone to glitches and is of uncertain value to users. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, acknowledges these concerns even as his company prepares to roll its generative-AI features out. Asked by The Washington Post this week about his confidence that Apple Intelligence will not “hallucinate,” or confidently assert false information as true to its users, Cook admitted: “It’s not 100 percent.”
The iPhone Is Now an AI Trojan Horse
By Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel
At Apple’s annual developers conference—where new software products are previewed in slick video presentations—the company finally joined the generative-AI race. The company introduced Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI features that will be rolled out to the tech giant’s latest operating systems starting this fall. New generative-AI models will help Apple users write work memos and highly personalized text; create images and emoji; connect and organize photos, calendar events, and emails.
What to Read Next
- This is what it looks like when AI eats the world: “The web itself is being shoved into a great unknown,” Charlie Warzel writes.
P.S.
Maybe Apple Intelligence will be enough to make the iPhone cool again. In 2022, I wrote about how the device has lost its spark.
—Damon
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