After years of questions, months of waiting and weeks of speculation, it's finally here. Apple Intelligence, the company's big plan to turn AI into the latest major feature for its devices, has arrived. In practice that means downloading an update to your iPhone, Mac or iPad and getting a few new features; in reality it means that Apple has begun a process that could redefine the company, for better or worse.
Apple is certainly ready to be defined by those plans. They were not only the dominant part of its WWDC software event in June, but also of the iPhone launch last month, despite the fact they weren't ready for the launch day. Apple has looked to cloak every product in a kind of Apple Intelligence robe since: the new iPhones, iPads and Macs have all been described as being built for Apple Intelligence, even if it's not clear what exactly that means practically.
For now the actual things on offer from Apple Intelligence are much more limited. It's not yet available in some regions and most languages; it isn't supported on almost every iPhone; the most exciting features are not here yet.
So this time around the newest iPhones get a small number of features; Apple has promised that it will overhaul Siri eventually, for instance, but we don't know when that will arrive or how much more useful it will really make the voice assistant. For now we have a more limited set. Writing tools will let you rewrite text, a cleanup tool lets you remove people or items from pictures, and new notification summaries will try and boil down long threads into short condensed descriptions.
This feature seems to be the one that has grabbed much of the discourse since Apple Intelligence was announced. It makes sense: it's the most obvious when you turn it on. But it's also the weirdest.
Numerous examples shared online show the downsides. In one, a user described having received a message from their mother about a hike having "almost killed me"; the summary turned it into "attempted suicide, but recovered and hiked in Redlands and Palm Springs". Just as that tweet suggests, the experience of using it is funny and sometimes horrifying: the system struggles with hyperbole, metaphor and much else besides.
That problem might speak to a broader question about Apple Intelligence: who, really, asked for this? Many people have been clamouring for Apple to catch up to the hype on artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, but those people seemed largely to be shareholders and commentators. It's not clear whether anyone wants it.
The summaries seem like a clear example of that. People like reading lots of messages, you hope; if they don't, there's a technology for avoiding that, which is blocking numbers and leaving groups. The texture of those chats – the jokes, the tonal variations, the use of multiple messages to convey a point – is often exactly why people are in them.
What's more, the summaries leave you in the sort of constantly questioning mode that feels like a prevalent feeling of the AI era. You read something and immediately ask yourself whether it was right, and then have to read the actual thing anyway. AI is many things but it's not reliable and it's not responsible, and there is a kind of constant work in ensuring that you never get tricked by its other great competencies into forgetting that important fact.
Another tweet this week that had proven astonishingly popular, gathering some 10k tweets at the time of sending, showed a screengrab of a TikTok in which someone complained that "even using ChatGPT feels like a lot of work at this point". Most of those reactions were laughing how lazy have we become, that we even tired of instructing our automated systems to do our work for us? And there is some truth in it. But we might also be making ourselves tired in whole new ways, and the iPhone's new summaries may just have summed that up.
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