Canāt wait for this! Iāve been using it a little bit on my iPad and Iām looking forward to your thoughts.
I took a risk and installed the developer beta on my MacBook Air to get access to the writing tools. So far Iāve run into zero problems with stability and compatibility.
I tried it out on an email I was writing to some colleagues and decided to make it more professional. It did a nice job, although I manually pulled it back just a little so it sounded more like me.
What I hope to play with is using the tool to make my writing more fit for those with 8th to 10th grade (US) reading levels. I do a LOT of legal writing, and after three decades of it, I have some bad habits to discard. This tool may help quite a bit. I will also have to put Grammarly to the test. (Yes, I know this idea is nothing new, but last week I watched a continuing education video where another Indiana judge talked about using AI to make documents more accessible to people without law degrees.)
Interesting episode. The whole ābaked-inā-ness of Apple Intelligence is so appealing.
I too hope they fully cook it.
Please do not take this as personal criticism, as itās a general concern about the technology that has been sparked by your post: donāt you worry that someone will be offended if you use AI to write an email to them?
I would be ā I would feel the sender couldnāt be bothered to write the email, and so why should I be bothered to read it? Or if I do read, I automatically downgrade the trustworthiness of the information (and of course the sender), just as I do with any obviously AI-generated text on the internet now.
Again, this isnāt a personal criticism ā Iām sure you wouldnāt send an email before checking, but I donāt doubt that many will just press send. I wonder how many people are going to find the technology harms rather than enhances their reputation.
Iām with you on this. Iāll not use AI as a āghostā writer. I will use it to proof my writing. I may also āchatā with AI about different ideas or approaches to a given topic to stimulate my thinking, but I will not have AI write for me. In my estimation, if I send something written by AI as though it was from me, Iād be artificial.
It does worry me that so many people seem to think generative AI as an unalloyed good: to me it seems that it will benefit the people who sell it, and benefit companies who will use it to sack workers, but Iām yet to be persuaded that that the benefits outweigh the risks for ordinary users who donāt want to cheat.
Thatās not to say that AI (in the sense of expert systems) doesnāt have immense potential in some fields ā say in assisting doctors to make better diagnoses. I just donāt think that creativity (āgenerative AIā) should be one of those fields.
Iām looking forward to this episode (itās on my playlist for the gym!)
I wish it was possible to put the term āAIā back in the bottle (I suspect itās not). Itās a marketing term more than describing any particular approach or paradigm. I have a lot of time for machine learning (which is Appleās big strength) where systems develop techniques to do useful things by modelling existing data and applying those models to new data. Those can be powerful tools.
Iām not so sure that I want my own use of language, or anyone elseās, to be modelled and generated. I assume that when words are sent my way, there is a mind behind them. I give thought (even if only lightly) to what I say or write to someone else. The communication is from person to person. At best, even astonishingly good AI is generating an emulation of that process. That can be useful, generating thoughts and phrases that I can āeditā and react to, to build a personal communication, but it would feel deeply wrong if I was left with the chatbot pretending to be the person.
Iāve been using āsmart composeā (predictive writing) in gmail and Google docs for a few years but I have no need for AI to write/rewrite any documents for me.
Iāll consider Apple Intelligence a success when Siri becomes a useful digital assistant.
I like AI in the context of writing tools. (I am a decent writer; I suck at grammar). Creating full essays and images wholecloth I find to be a problem. Apple Intelligence is like 85% there for what I want.
Sometimes I need to create short , effective communication, quickly. I will use AI voice transcription (audiopen) for emails for clinical notes, I will also use Ai to summarize my notes and use language and a tone that is more personable than clinical. I am not trying to create prose that reflect humour or evoke emotion. I just need people to have the information and my time is limited. This is a job for AI. I am in complete control of what finally gets sent - AI gets me there faster.
On Mastodon, Justin Pot recently said that if youāre going to use AI to write an email to me, donāt bother. Just send me the prompts. By definition, theyāll contain everything you want to tell me.
Oof, I wasnāt very clear. I wrote the email myself and used the AI to tweak it. Iām definitely not one to use AI to write for me, but Iāll give AI a chance to improve it. I may accept or reject those āimprovements.ā
I think people are really underestimating how game changing Apple Intelligence will be. By the end of the year, tens of millions of people, most of whom normally wouldnāt care about AI, will update their devices and get private, on-device AI integrated into their OS and apps.
I use ChatGPT to write for me, but first I use it to do a load of thinking. The too and fro helps me harness my thoughts. I use dictation (and the speech mode) to have a conversation. Iām always in charge of whatās going on. And I am often amazed at the results.
Once Iāve done some thinking, Iāll often ask to summarise or to write a simple article for me, and then I will edit and edit and edit it until Iām happy.
And then Iāll pass stuff through Grammarly just to check my writing.
This is different to what A(pple)I will do, out of the box, but I write books for a living and the ability to have a conversation that gets summarised and produces a clunky draft has unblocked me.
This episode was disappointing, not because of the quality of the discussion (which was top-level, as always), nor the efforts of Apple to implement Apple Intelligence (they canāt release whatās not ready yet). But I donāt see myself using most if any of the new features. I already subscribe to Claude, and use it in my own way when I want to perform text processing. Hereās what I need Apple Intelligence to do, hopefully sooner than later:
- First and foremost, make dictation learn how humans speak and write, and especially how I do. Android has done this for years. When I dictate to an Apple device, sometimes it nails it, but often itās so stupid it boggles the mind. No more using the wrong word when the context is clear, or random capitalizations. Better yet, when I text, I want it to learn from me. When I correct āAMā to āamā twice, from now on when I say āaye emm,ā it should write āamā and not āAMā.
- This is equally important for the phone call recording feature, or future meeting recording/transcriptions. If itās stuggling with how we talk, is it going to be useful? It will need to add speaker differentiation, too. This area needs and deserves attention.
- Let me create my own routines. This includes learning how I do things. For example, when I tell Siri to text someone, I donāt want it to reply, āDo you want work or mobile?ā I always want mobile unless I tell you otherwise. And if I choose a different number to text for a certain contact, then keep texting to that specified number without asking me until I tell you otherwise.
- But the routines should also include learning how to do things in the way I want, not how Apple thinks I want. So, for example, I want to play certain music on my bathroom Sonos when Iām getting ready in the morning. Thereās no way to do this currently. I want Apple Intelligence to make a routine based just on my telling it,
- āWhen I tell you to play morning music, that means you will open the Sonos app, set the room to Bathroom, select Search, select Services, select Apple Music, select user jr5, select Playlists, select Morning Music, press the shuffle button, press the play button, and set the volume to 25%.ā
- Then I can tell Siri to play morning music. I donāt need the Sonos app to create any OS hooks. Apple Intelligence should be able to know whatās on the screen, and what a shuffle button looks like, for example.
If Apple Intelligence does everything the same way for every user, and doesnāt learn and store what individual users want, then its value is a fraction of what it could be. I really hope they move it in the learning-and-remembering direction.
I think itās appropriate to use AI to enhance my creative writing but not to replace it. Of course, the issue is where to draw the line between enhancing and replacing.
Letting AI draft an article, then editing it, and publishing it is me enhancing AIās work, not the AI enhancing my work. On the other hand, if I do my own thinking and organization and write my own first draft, then ask AI for suggestions to improve my writing, thatās AI enhancing my writing.
Hereās a blog post I published recently on this topic: