by Dan Moren
Is Apple really lagging in AI, or is AI lagging in usefulness?
CNN Business’s Allison Morrow on the narrative around Apple’s AI misses:
This is where we, the people, are apparently failing AI. Because in addition to being humans with jobs and social lives and laundry to fold and art to make and kids to raise, we should also learn how to tiptoe around the limitations of large language models that may or may not return accurate information to us.
Apple, [NYT tech columnist Kevin] Roose says, should keep pushing AI into its products and just get used to the idea that those features may be unpolished and a little too advanced for the average user.
And again, respectfully, I would ask: To what end?
Astute take from Morrow that sums up a lot of the issues with AI, specifically where it falls short. This is yet another case of people adapting to machines, when the point is that our technology should adapt to us.
The thesis of the piece is not about excusing Apple’s AI missteps, but zooming out to take a look at the bigger picture of why AI is everywhere, and make the argument that maybe Apple is well-served by not necessarily being on the cutting edge of these developments.1
- One minor quibble with is that Morrow references the contentious “Crush” commercial as “one of Apple’s early ads for its AI”. That ad was, of course, for the iPad, and was released (and subsequently pulled) in May, a month before Apple Intelligence debuted at WWDC. ↩