After watching Apple’s WWDC24 keynote event earlier this week, I was left with a lot of mixed emotions (insert custom mixed-emotions genmoji here). I typically approach these events with a healthy blend of excitement and reservation; after all, there’s no reason to applaud Apple for table-stakes features that should have been built years ago, such as emoji tapbacks and automatic email categorization and a true password management app. But some of the announcements, as always, were genuinely impressive and exciting.
And then there’s the big, intelligent elephant in the room.
Overshadowing these overdue quality-of-life OS improvements and iterative innovations, of course, was the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The big reveal. The shoe that’s been itching to drop.
Apple Intelligence.
Apple’s take on AI (which they’ve cleverly coopted for themselves, but may I remind you actually stands for artificial intelligence) is finally here. And with it, comes a whooooole lot of feelings. Not just from me, but seemingly from anyone even remotely interested in Apple or in tech in general.
Before I share my feelings, let me just put it out there: I’m not an absolute AI rejectionist, nor a techno-doomer. But I am a techno-moralist: a firm believer in aligning technology and its applications with the overall moral imperatives of society. Or, more simply put, make computer do good, not do bad. So I (maybe unsurprisingly) have some qualms with the current state of AI, and generative AI more specifically.
So I have to say, some of Apple’s freshly revealed uses for AI make me a little queasy.
While genmoji, for example, look fun and innocent enough (I’m assuming Apple has safeguards in place to prevent the creation of emojified genitalia, or Hitler on a surfboard…?), the bigger and more concerning reveal around image generation is their new, cutely named Image Playground.
I think the fellas over at Upgrade said it best when they described the “second-hand embarrassment” they felt when the first AI-generated images showed up on the keynote screen. I felt this too; an indescribable cringe that permeated my entire being. But it’s not just that I don’t want people sending me hokey, Pixar-nightmare-fuel images of myself.
One of the examples they shared in the keynote was the ability to circle a sketch you’ve drawn — in this case, a chhatri pavilion of historic Indian architecture — and turn it into an AI-generated image. This is bad, bad, bad.
I firmly believe that AI should not be used to create images of historic or culturally significant people, places, artifacts, or events. I will die on this hill, if I must. History has been erased and rewritten plenty by those with nefarious intentions for centuries, even in the face of the broader historic record. But when that history becomes polluted with fake images of what our world once was, or what once took place, how will future generations know what’s true and what’s not?
It may seem silly to worry about at this point — I mean really, what’s the harm in adding AI-generated images to someone’s personal notes from history class?
But it’s the normalization of this type of artificial artifact that scares me the most. Once it’s okay in a student’s school notes, it’s okay in a professor’s lecture slides. And once it’s okay there, it’s okay in a research paper. And then in a textbook. And encyclopedias. And from there, it’s officially part of history.
That brings me to my broader point: it’s a slippery slope we’ve been treading with genAI already, and Apple just greased the whole thing.
I’m sure you’re already aware of this, but Apple is, like, a really big company. They surpassed 1 billion active iPhone users back in 2021, and have only gained market share since then. Over half of all smartphones in the US are iPhones. So for one of the biggest tech companies in the world to not just embrace, but endorse, this use of AI? Well, that cat isn’t going back in the bag.
It’s unfair to just target Apple here, though. Google has been on quite a roll building and announcing their generative AI features, to name one competitor. It would certainly be foolish to not expect Apple to respond to the obvious trend here in some way. I guess, maybe I just thought they’d take a more thoughtful approach to their implementations, as they often do when sat side-by-side with their competition. Maybe that’s where the real foolishness lies?
I haven’t even mentioned some of the other announced AI features, like the writing tools that help you draft a more professional-sounding email or invite your friends to dinner with a cheesy poem. I don’t have a lot more to say about this, other than this being just another way Apple is embracing the AI-powered pollution of creativity. And it’s not much different than what people have already been doing with ChatGPT or other generative text tools.
Also worth mentioning are the much-needed improvements to Siri, powered by machine learning and better natural language processing. This is the one area where I was absolutely thrilled to see this technology being applied, as it’s been the most obvious and necessary AI use case we’ve all waited years for. It’s a perfect example of why I’m not anti-artificial intelligence — we can, and should, make these tools work harder to help us, not replace us.
But alas, the Siri upgrades were just one facet of a particularly complicated release from Apple this week. Yet, in a way, none of it really matters, does it? Because when it comes to AI, pandara’s box is open, and there’s no going back. If the big Apple is embracing this tech in all the most morally and ethically ambiguous ways, everyone else (who hasn’t already) will too.
Like everyone’s other favorite topic of the week, kudzu, it will be a matter of containment, not elimination, at this point. How can we contain the damage that stands to be done by harmful use of generative AI? Especially when the tech is being shoved in our faces, in all of our apps and by all our devices? How will we preserve the sanctity of true human creativity and culture, of history and (in a more existential sense) of reality?
And most importantly: how will we ever forgive big tech for allowing our friends and family to send us imaginatively dorky pictures of ourselves that look like this?
