I was listening to the Upgrade podcast yesterday, where they discussed Apple’s new intelligence tools in the latest OS releases. Jason Snell made an interesting point about Apple Intelligence.
As a professional writer, he said there isn’t much in Apple’s new tools for him. But he pointed out something that hadn’t occurred to me (probably because I am a very selfish guy): while Apple’s AI, or any AI, might not be useful to writers like him or me, most people aren’t writers. For a lot of peeps, getting a coherent sentence down on a page or screen is a real struggle.
Apple seems to have designed their tools to specifically help with tasks like, “Make this sloppy, unprofessional-sounding email sound a lot better,” or, “Take this long-winded thousand-word email and give me the key points.” It’s not about writing the next great novel or epic poem—it’s about helping non-writers get their thoughts into emails or documents without sounding like they didn’t pass high school English.
While Snell was clear that Apple’s AI had nothing to offer him creatively, he seemed to think it’d be very short-sighted to assume no one else could benefit from it. I think he’s right, both specifically about this bunch of OS updates and more generally about Large Language Models.
Personally, I’ve made my peace with the inevitability of being enslaved by the robots, and I’m simply trying to work out how not to be destroyed by them. One example: I still use dictation software because it’s way faster than typing, even with the recognition errors. A good use of AI for me, then, is feeding a first draft—dictated and full of those errors—into an AI editor, then telling it, “This was dictated; it’s rough and full of artifacts. Just clean up the mistakes but keep my tone and voice.”
For my purposes, that works almost flawlessly. I’m still doing all the creative lifting, but it speeds up the creation.
But for people who aren’t writing thousands of words a day, an empty page can be intimidating, whether they’re writing by hand or just dictating. They struggle to form coherent sentences, let alone string together pages and chapters. If our robot overlords can help them with that, who am I to say they shouldn’t use it?
On the other hand, a huge proportion of the web’s written content is now worthless AI slop. Eventually, almost all of it will be.
Anyway, I’ll understand if nobody wants to answer, but I am curious if any of you are using these tools for work or whatever.