AI most likely isn't the large promoting level for smartphones that Apple and different tech giants assume it’s

As is tradition this time of year, Apple announced a new iPhone lineup last week. The promised centerpiece that would get us to buy these new devices was AI – or Apple Intelligence, as they called it. Still, the response from the collective world of consumer technology was muted.

Consumers' lack of enthusiasm was so obvious that Apple's stock price immediately fell by over a hundred billion dollars. Even the Wired Gadget Lab podcast, which is passionate about all things new tech, didn't find anything in the new features that would make them want to switch to the iPhone 16.

The only thing that seemed to cause some excitement wasn't the AI ​​features, but the addition of a new camera shutter button on the side of the phone. If a button is a better selling point than the most hyped technology of recent years, something is clearly wrong.

The reason for this is that AI is now past what tech blog The Media Copilot called the “miracle phase.” Two years ago, we were amazed that ChatGPT, DALL-E, and other generative AI systems were able to create coherent writing and realistic images from just a few words in a text prompt. But now the AI ​​has to show that it can actually be productive. Since their introduction, the models that enable these experiences have become much more powerful – and exponentially more expensive.

Still, Google, NVidia, Microsoft and OpenAI recently met at the White House to discuss AI infrastructure, suggesting that these companies are doubling down on technology.

According to Forbes, the industry is $500 billion (£375 billion) short of paying back the massive investment in AI hardware and software, and the $100 billion in AI revenue predicted in 2024 is not coming even close to this number. But Apple still needs to enthusiastically integrate AI features into its products for the same reason as Google, Samsung and Microsoft – to give consumers a reason to buy a new device.

Difficult sell?

Before AI, the industry tried to create hype around virtual reality and the Metaverse, an effort that likely culminated with the launch of the Apple Vision Pro headset in 2023 (a product, incidentally, in the announcement of the last was barely mentioned this week).

After the Metaverse failed to take off, tech companies needed something else to drive sales, and AI has become the new shiny thing. However, it remains to be seen whether consumers will embrace the AI-based features included in phones, such as photo editing and typing assistants. That's not to say that current AI isn't useful. AI technologies are used in multi-billion dollar industrial applications, from online advertising to healthcare and energy optimization.

Thanks to Apple's visual intelligence, the phone's camera can be pointed at something, such as a restaurant, to get information without having to perform a search.
Heiko Küverling

Generative AI has also become a useful tool for professionals in many fields. According to a survey, 97% of software developers have used AI tools to support their work. Many journalists, visual artists, musicians and filmmakers have used AI tools to create content faster and more efficiently.

But most of us aren't actually willing to pay for a service that draws funny cartoon cats or summarizes text – especially since attempts at AI-powered search have proven error-prone. Apple's approach to using artificial intelligence appears to be largely a mix of existing features, many of which are already built into popular third-party apps.

Apple's AI can help you create a custom emoji, transcribe a phone call, edit a photo or write an email – nice stuff, but no longer groundbreaking. There's also something called Reduce Mode, which is supposed to disturb you less and only let important notifications through, but how well that will work in reality remains unclear.

The only future-oriented function is called Visual Intelligence. This allows you to point the camera at something in the environment and get information without explicitly performing a search. For example, you could take a photo of a restaurant sign and the phone will tell you the menu, show you reviews – and maybe even help you reserve a table.

While this is very reminiscent of the lens in Google's Pixel phones (or the multimodal capabilities of ChatGPT), it does suggest a future use of AI that is more real-time, interactive, and based in real-world environments.

By extension, Apple Intelligence and Reduce Mode could evolve into so-called “context-aware computing,” which has been presented and demonstrated in research projects since the 1990s but, for the most part, has not yet become robust enough to be a real product category .

The kicker in all of this is that Apple Intelligence isn't really available for everyone to try out yet, as the new iPhones don't include it yet. Perhaps they will turn out to be more valuable than the limited information suggests. However, Apple used to be known for not releasing a product until it was truly ready, meaning the use case was crystal clear and the user experience was perfected.

This makes the iPod and iPhone so much more attractive than all the MP3 players and smartphones that came before them. It's unclear whether Apple's AI approach will be able to recoup some of the lost stock price, not to mention the hundreds of billions the company and the rest of the tech industry have invested. Finally, AI still has amazing potential, but it might be time to slow down
Take a moment to consider where it is actually most useful.

Lars Erik Holmquist, Professor of Design and Innovation, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.