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Apple Intelligence is billed as an AI assistant designed to make daily admin effortless. That means it can sift through our private messages and emails. Apple claims the system is completely secure, but are you confident enough to run with it?
Having bided its time, Apple is finally throwing its hat into the commercial AI ring.
Being fashionably late (as much as two years) is undoubtedly a risk, but there are significant upsides – chiefly, capitalising on the perceived shortcomings of rivals.
One of the chief concerns surrounding Tech’s newest obsession is privacy and security. How can you guarantee people their sensitive information is safe, when the processes of AI are ambiguous at best and its capabilities are constantly changing?
Only now are laws coming into effect about what companies are allowed to scrape from the web in order to train their deep learning models, for instance.
The industry’s safeguards, which are still generally perceived as lax, are hard to effectively enforce due to the breakneck pace as which AI is developing and the number of companies building their own platforms.
In typically grandiose fashion, however, Apple claims it has cracked the issue of privacy – despite offering arguably the most invasive AI application yet – at the WWDC last week.
What is Apple Intelligence?
Apple’s vision for general AI is to create an omnipresent assistant to streamline the daily admin activities of anyone who owns their devices. Siri, its ubiquitous voice assistant, has also been supercharged.
Its showcase highlighted ‘email assistance’ as a key feature, in which AI provided smart suggestions, automated sorting, and personalised responses based on the context and history of an email recipient. It was undeniably impressive.
If someone sent an email with a specific query, the AI would search through previous emails and instantly pick out the answer, all while allowing for the seamless creation of reminders and meetings as follow-up actions.
The actual content of emails, meanwhile, could be entirely generated or amended for tone and grammar in a matter of seconds.
Underpinning the entire product, ‘contextual awareness’ is supposedly able to understand who our contacts are across all of our apps.
That means, say, should you want to know what time your mother’s plane is due to land, Siri would search your messages, emails, WhatsApp, Insta Dms and other history of correspondence and quickly find the answer presented in a custom notification.
On a dull bus journey, you could say or type ‘Play that podcast Jess was talking about’ and it would perform the necessary steps to check your messages and play the media from a third-party app.
You can also generate specific emojis and graphics able to capture the likeness of the person you’re messaging in a sketch or cartoon form.
If, like me, your brain isn’t naturally geared for organisation, Apple Intelligence sounds dreamy in a practical sense. But, given the security concerns surrounding AI, is there a major drawback or privacy shit storm in the offing?
