2 weeks Ago By Tim Biggs
The first Apple Intelligence features have finally arrived. Kind of. On recent iPhones and Macs, you can set your language to US English and download tools that kick off Apple’s long-promised generative AI suite, with more tools (and official Australian English support) coming in December.
Apple has a reputation for holding off on technological advancements, letting other companies stumble over the early issues and teething problems, and then delivering a more refined and usable version. But I’m not sure that’s happening here. Technically the tools are still labelled as being in beta, which used to mean not fit for public use but recently has come to mean “might be weird or lie to you”.
Credit: The language tools on Google and Samsung phones feel nascent and unreliable. They give the impression that the systems understand how to make nice sentences but have no clue what anything actually means, that the people who designed them view conversations as purely informational and transactional, and that the companies behind them have sent the features live specifically so they can gather feedback on how to fix them. The first Apple Intelligence features have the same problem.
In a purely practical sense, these tools have been promoted as part of an ecosystem of features that can save you time and energy while you get things done, limiting your need to deal with busywork. But they could only ever start to do that if you could comfortably rely on them without double-checking their work. For now, you can’t do that.
The ability to summarise a long passage of text, or multiple messages, into a short sentence is one of the more promising Apple Intelligence features, at least in theory. At present, the preview of an email chain or a flurry of WhatsApp messages gives us little to work with beyond telling us how many messages there are, so the idea to have AI give us a bit more context is a good one. But in practice I didn’t find the summaries that much more useful.
On my phone, what would ordinarily be an opaque stack of Gmail notifications became absolute gibberish as the AI tried to smoosh automated follow-ups, marketing material and spammy messages into a coherent alert, so I had to expand it to see what they were anyway. Turning several smart home alerts or two-factor authentication messages into sentences also isn’t very useful (though it is funny). On a Mac, the AI was forced to deal with the never-ending onslaught of Slack messages, but it did so by picking out two or three from the dozen it had received and always missed the ones that were actually meaningful.
Again, this didn’t make things worse as I had to expand and read the messages as before, but neither did it improve anything. In the Mail app you get summaries in the default view instead of the first line of the email, but it’s rare that the summaries are more useful. Most emails I get have the important stuff (if any) in the first sentence, though I spotted a few where the AI had identified (for example) that “the event has been delayed to November 24” was more pertinent than the opening waffle.
The best implementation for summaries is breaking down conversations that you missed, as the system does a pretty good job conveying what each person has said or asked for. But so far, I’ve only seen this on a notification for a group chat and as a clickable option in Mail. Then there are the Writing Tools.
Select any passage of text on Mac or iPhone and you can now bring up a set of options to mess around with it. I have a number of problems with this, and once again I don’t want it to seem like I’m singling Apple out because there are plenty of other tools that do the same thing. Any obvious issue is that you can highlight entire articles or stories and hit the big “rewrite” button to remix and rearrange it as if you’re a high-school kid plagiarising an essay, except it takes two seconds.
The results are generally a bit robotic and tend to sound like an over-egged eBay listing, but it does the job. I’m just not sure what purpose that job serves. You can also ask it to make writing more professional or more friendly, but it almost always homogenises it and puts in cliches that you might usually avoid, or unnecessarily replaces words in ways that can change the meaning, for example changing “business” to “conglomerate”.
You can ask to make the writing more concise, but you’ll necessarily lose detail. If it worked perfectly, and if you found yourself frequently spending time and energy rewriting text to sound more professional, I could buy it as a productivity gain. But it doesn’t, and I don’t think many of us do.
There are surely situations where you think something sounds clunky, and you want some advice to clean it up, but this is another AI platform offering to strip some humanity out of communication to add meaningless pleasantries or marketing talk. It’s a similar story with the new “smart replies” that show up as tappable options when responding to messages. Google has had these for a while, but I would be too embarrassed to send them to another human.
Apple’s are the same. I’d sooner send a thumbs-up emoji than an impersonal “sorry, busy today”, or “I’m sorry to hear that”, or “yes, tell me the details” as drafted by AI. Sure the system might have guessed an appropriate expression, but it feels gross to communicate this way, especially when it takes me two seconds to type something myself.
The other bits and pieces included in this first batch of Apple Intelligence feel like a preview of what’s to come more than finished products. Siri has a new visual design, can answer troubleshooting questions about your Apple gear and can take your requests in written form as well as spoken, but it isn’t fundamentally different. “Clean Up” in Photos lets you lightly revise history by circling objects you wish weren’t there and have AI do a quick Photoshop job to excise them, with results varying depending on what kind of objects the system attempts to create in the vacuum.
In the future, Apple Intelligence will add the ability to generate cartoony pictures you describe, generate emojis of anything, and turn sketches into more complex drafts. It will also let you tap into ChatGPT to generate much larger chunks of text based on minimal prompts. Does that sound useful to you? The fact is, Apple Intelligence right now is pretty far from it, which puts it on an even footing with other so-called time-saving AI suites.
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