When Apple's version of AI, branded Apple Intelligence, rolls out to people in October with the company's latest hardware, the reaction will likely be a mix of delight and disappointment.
AI capabilities will bring helpful new features as they make their way into Apple's walled garden, such as: B. Text summaries in emails, messages and Safari; image creation; and a more context-aware version of Siri.
But as Apple Intelligence's beta tests have already made clear, the performance of these features is well below what big players like OpenAI, Google and Meta offer. Apple AI will not come close to the quality of document summarization, image or audio generation, which cannot be accessed by any of the frontier models.
But Apple Intelligence will do something that none of its flagship offerings can: change the perception of AI and its role in everyday life for a large proportion of users around the world.
The real impact of Apple AI will not be practical, but moral. It will normalize AI and make it seem less alien or complex. This frees the AI from the idea of cheating or cutting corners. It will help a critical mass of users overcome the threshold of doubt or mystification about AI and create a level of comfort and acceptance, even a level of trust.
Overcome early doubts
Generative AI has faced two problems since ChatGPT was launched in 2022. Many have wondered what its real purpose is, or whether it is truly useful in the face of hallucinations and other problems rooted in training data. Others questioned the ethics of using AI, seeing it as a form of fraud or copyright infringement.
But as we've learned over the last few months, language models are most effective when they work with our own documents and data, as with platforms like NotebookLM or GPT4o, which can now handle more than 50 to 100 books of material we upload.
The output of the prompts we run – in the form of article or lecture summaries, reports, slide decks, and even podcasts – is much more accurate and useful than the output of previous chatbots. Apple Intelligence leverages these insights by targeting most of its AI capabilities toward user data rather than data on the web.
Domesticating AI
Since Apple Intelligence works primarily with our own data, much of its output will likely reflect the higher quality output we see with tools like NotebookLM – compared to AI that works primarily with large amounts of anonymous training data, like ChatGPT in its early days.
When AI works primarily with user data – and often does – a new association will emerge in people's minds between generative AI and personal information, rather than between different training data. It will likely lead us to view AI as something essential to our personal routines, such as reading email or catching the morning news.
This, in turn, will make the use of more powerful tools such as GPT4o or Claude more socially and ethically acceptable. Once we get into the habit of using AI to summarize or edit our emails, summarize articles on the Internet into concise summaries, or edit images into photos, we will think less about whether it makes sense to use NotebookLM for creation a first draft of a memo or create a report or use Dall-E to create images.
“AI for the rest of us”
Apple has a long history of making complex technologies more accessible to everyday users, and that's their goal for AI.
When word processors first came onto the market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a similar uncertainty about the appropriateness of using them to write things—the belief that something authentic or human about writing by hand would be lost.
For many, computers themselves were too daunting to embrace. But Apple's Macintosh personal computer, with its graphical user interface and WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) functionality, helped domesticate and normalize the use of computers for writing. Over time, writing would become so closely linked to word processing that we would hardly be able to imagine one without the other.
Apple Intelligence could do for generative AI what the Mac or graphical user interface did for PCs: help tame it and make it seem ordinary and acceptable. Apple's marketing team points this out in its slogan for Apple Intelligence: “AI for the rest of us.”
If history is any guide, Apple will play a key role in changing the way we think about AI. Doing many of our basic tasks without it may soon seem unthinkable.
Robert Diab, Professor, School of Law, Thompson Rivers University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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