Again, all this is happening on the device; you’re not sending these photos to some random server. The generative AI features also seem a bit bland and even cartoonish — perhaps purposefully so, to avoid the appearance of AI misinformation. This is a good thing since a surge in realistic AI-generated content is driving a new and dangerous surge of misinformation. So don’t expect any fake pope-in-a-puffer-coat images to be made using Apple Intelligence.
Apple’s convincing case that AI doesn’t have to be scary
Apple Intelligence wants to be the cool dad of artificial intelligence.
The on-device detail is key to making Apple’s privacy promise work. Apple has built its reputation on protecting its users’ data privacy and keeping that data on the actual device rather than sending it to a cloud server where it could get mishandled. The catch is that the most advanced AI features require a tremendous amount of compute power, which is why interactions with products like ChatGPT happen on remote servers. That data is then stored and used to train the model to become even more powerful.
This sort of thing has been roundly described by experts in the field as a privacy nightmare. Apple, though, has a solution to this problem in the form of a new service called Private Cloud Compute. In effect, for more complex tasks that require data to be sent to a server, Apple will only send your data to its own super-secure servers. Otherwise, the data never leaves your device and your baby photos remain safe.
“You should not have to hand over all the details of your life to be warehoused and analyzed in someone’s AI cloud,” Craig Federighi, the Apple executive who oversees iOS and macOS, said in the keynote presentation at WWDC on Monday.
You can have the scary AI, too, if you want it
In true Apple fashion, there was a bit of a “one more thing” announcement at the end of all this, though.
Just in case you’re not satisfied with Apple Intelligence and its milquetoast approach to AI, Apple has partnered with OpenAI, making it easy to access ChatGPT through Siri and Apple’s new Writing Tools. In some cases where Siri might not have all the answers, for example, the assistant will suggest you send the query to ChatGPT and will even make you confirm that you want to share your data with OpenAI servers. You will also have the option to use ChatGPT to generate text and images in documents. Federighi also confirmed plans to offer access to more third-party AI models, including Google Gemini, in an interview after the keynote.