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Apple Unintelligence? Apple made a lot of bold claims about its Apple Intelligence suite of AI features during the iPhone 16 reveal yesterday, with Tim Cook calling it the "beginning of an exciting new era." But it seems that Cupertino needs to make some improvements to the prerelease version of the software if it wants to live up to those claims. According to at least one user, Apple Intelligence often isn't very intelligent.
Apple is banking on Apple Intelligence to give its stagnant iPhone sales a boost. The technology received plenty of coverage during yesterday's Glowtime event, such as its ability to identify objects via the camera, summarize and prioritize notifications, search through photos based on descriptions, and power an improved Siri.
Apple Intelligence is available in the developer-preview version of iOS 18.1. The Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler was one of those who tested some of the AI's features. The verdict? It suffers from many of the same problems that plague other generative AIs, especially when it comes to hallucinations.
Fowler did say that Apple Intelligence has some helpful features, such as finding photos using natural language and editing images. However, like all generative AIs, the technology often gets things wrong, sometimes in hilarious ways.
Some of the errors Fowler encountered included nonsensical summaries of video doorbell notifications, bizarrely inaccurate descriptions of photos, and an instance of making the writer appear bald when asked to tidy up his hair in a photo.
Apple Intelligence often tried to get Fowler to take the wrong actions, too. An email confirming a recent log-in was summarized by the AI as a request to change his password immediately. Elsewhere, a phishing scam email about his Social Security number being deactivated was summarized and given elevated priority.
Apple Intelligence also summarizes social media notifications. By misreading an alert about Tim Walz's brother, the AI informed Fowler that Trump had endorsed Walz for president.
Apple emphasizes that the preview version of Apple Intelligence isn't necessarily representative of the final product. There were also some features not available to test, including the generative AI emojis.
Apple says a version of Apple Intelligence will start rolling out in beta next month with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, with more features launching in the coming months. iDevice users might want to confirm the technology's worst elements have been addressed before turning it on.