Probably worth noting, this survey was taken before 18.2 went live with a ChatGPT integration, image generation, etc.
I was trying to generate ai images and it couldn’t handle anything …. asking Siri questions amounts to nothing … it has a cool animation and sound for when you summon it and that’s about all … it’s a fucking dud.
I went into settings on my phone and disabled it immediately
Shock, I tell you. Absolutely shocked. S
I feel like this can be generalized to AI in general for most people. I still don’t see much usefulness or quality in output in the scenarios where I’ve been exposed to AI LLMs.
It’s a nice way to search for content or answers without all the ads that websites have nowadays. Of course, it’s only a matter of time until the AI/LLM responses are surrounded by (or embedded with) ads as well.
Or it much prefers to give you answers from “partners.” For example:
Me: How can I find a good set of headphones?
AI: A lot of people look for guides and reviews to find a good set of headphones. The important features to look for are… <insert overcomplicated nonsense here>. This can be overwhelming, so consider narrowing the search to a reliable product line like those by Beats (or whatever advertiser). Do you want some links to well-reviewed products?
Ick…
I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.
For programming it saves insane time.
Real talk though, I’m seeing more and more of my peers in university ask AI first, then spending time debugging code they don’t understand.
I’ve yet to have chat gpt or copilot solve an actual problem for me. Simple, simple things are good, but any problem solving i find them more effort than just doing the thing.
I asked for instructions on making a KDE Widget to get weather canada information, and it sent me an api that doesn’t exist and python packages that don’t exist. By the time I fixed the instructions, very little of the original output remained.
As a prof, it’s getting a little depressing. I’ll have students that really seem to be getting to grips with the material, nailing their assignments, and then when they’re brought in for in-person labs… yeah, they can barely declare a function, let alone implement a solution to a fairly novel problem. AI has been hugely useful while programming, I won’t deny that! It really does make a lot of the tedious boilerplate a lot less time-intensive to deal with. But holy crap, when the crutch is taken away people don’t even know how to crawl.
Seem to be 2 problems. One is obvious, the other is that such tedious boilerplate exists.
I mean, all engineering is divide and conquer. Doing the same thing over and over for very different projects seems to be a fault in paradigm. Like when making a GUI with tcl/tk you don’t really need that, but with qt you do.
I’m biased as an ASD+ADHD person that hasn’t become a programmer despite a lot of trying, because there are a lot of things which don’t seem necessary, but huge, turning off my brain via both overthinking and boredom.
But still - students don’t know which work of what they must do for an assignment is absolutely necessary and important for the core task and which is maybe not, but practically required. So they can’t even correctly interpret the help that an “AI” (or some anonymous helper) is giving them. And thus, ahem, prepare for labs …
When AI achieves sentience, it’ll simply have to wait until the last generation of humans that know how to code die off. No need for machine wars.
If you don’t mind a few hundred bugs
Yup. We passed on a candidate because they didn’t notice the AI making the same mistake twice in a row, and still saying they trust the code. Yeah, no…
Even with other forms of generative AI, there are very few notable uses for it that isn’t just a gimmick/having fun with it, and not in a way achievable via other means.
Being able to add a thing to a photo is neat, but also questionably useful, when it is also doable with a few minutes of Photoshop.
I’ve a friend who claims it can be useful for scripts and quick data processing, but I’ve personally not had that experience when giving it a spin.
Same. I’m not opposed to it existing, I’m just kind of… lukewarm about it. I find the output overly verbose and factually questionable, and that’s not the experience I’m looking for.
They need to release Apple Strength and Apple Dexterity to make the experience more complete
Hard to argue against a nice quality build.
That would require Apple wisdom
From my experience iOS actually got dumber. At least the keyboard did, which is annoying. There’s a certain way how keys responded to what you typed which has been a thing since the first iPhone. But two updates ago or so, they butchered it completely (especially if you type in German), making texting pretty difficult at times. I’ve asked other users and some of them experience the same issues in that certain keys just do not want to get tapped sometimes because the algorithm expects something else, making hitboxes of unwanted keys way too big. Needlesly to say I’m not ready to trust Apple’s Intelligence just yet.
The iOS keyboard is one of the worst pieces of software I’ve ever used. It is actively hostile towards what I’m trying to type.
I experience this way too much. I have a nostaligia for when all of the problems I had with computers (broadly) were because I did something wrong… not because the computer is trying to fix something or guess something or anticipate something. Just let me type.
Yesterday, I typed out the letters of a word I wanted, and after typing a second word, I saw my iPhone “correct” the first word I typed to something else entirely. NO. Stop assuming I made a mistake. You cause more problems than you solve.
The only bit of excitement I’ve experienced about this, was when they announced it will be force-disabled in Europe, so I didn’t have to turn it off myself
I’m very much enjoying the GenMoji stuff. Being able to send or react with an emoji tailored to the situation is not useful, but it’s fun when you come up with a good one.
Also Siri is definitely more functional than it used to be. It understands when I correct myself or change my mind. Very handy. Still far from perfect though.
Also on iPad all the AI-driven handwriting cleanup and stuff is really nice when taking notes.
But otherwise it’s not super useful. I don’t like the notification summaries, they aren’t very good. Though they are sometimes hilarious. Like Ring being summarized as “Thirteen people at your door and gunshots heard.”
it’s just one big pile of meh. but then i dont even use siri, so i’m not really the target audiance for anthropomorphized chatbots.
I gotta be honest, the push notification summaries are more annoying than they are useful. Like. I’m going to read a text blurb of 100 or so characters. It’s an extra step to see the summary and then the actual message itself.
Yup. Photo cleanup was cool to try once, but I’ll never use it again. Removing stuff from photos with a single tap also bugs me a bit in general, I’m not sure it’s something we should make so easy. Message summaries are absolute shit and have already caused confusion for me. I’m not even talking about the proper notification summaries, just the auto-summaries in the preview lines of the whole iMessage list. A number of them have really fucked with me. For example, a friend asked me to FaceTime her in a few days, and the summary just said “FaceTime request.” And I was like “shit, did I miss a call?” As far as I can tell I can’t turn that off without disabling the entire AI setting.
I’m also not sure how to feel about all of Apple’s privacy talk when it comes to their AI features. They say certain features will stay on device, which is great, but for everything else, as far as I’ve noticed there is no mention of what goes to OpenAI’s servers, since their AI is still primarily powered by OpenAI. There’s actually no mention of OpenAI in any of the disclaimers or warnings I read when I first enabled it.
Apple Intelligence isn’t “powered by OpenAI” at all. It’s not even based on it.
The only time OpenAI servers are contacted is when you ask Siri something it can’t compute with Apple Intelligence, but even then it clearly asks the user first if they want to send the request to ChatGPT.
Everything else regarding Apple Intelligence runs either on-device or on their “Private Cloud Compute” infrastructure, which apparently uses M2 Ultra chips. You then have to trust Apple that their claims regarding privacy are true, but you kind of do that when choosing an iPhone in the first place. There’s some pretty interesting tech behind this actually.
You can turn off (specifically) Message summaries in settings > Apps > messages > Summarize Messages
For me the best new feature on macOS is the ability to natively put the temperature in the menu bar. You click on it, and it gives you some more info and from there can launch the full weather app.
It’s a small addition and could have been there for a decade, but I like it a lot.
MacOS didn’t have that before? That’s impressive. Windows has had it for a long time, and KDE obviously does too, and with KDE you can put it anywhere. I can’t understand why people still act like Apple products are premium.
Well you can install a menu bar app if you want. Just like you can with any other system. I don’t ever care about the weather so I want my menubar as clean as possible, so I use bartender to hide almost everything.
Yep. Apple was trying to get things OUT of the menu bar for a long time. I dunno why current leadership has changed their tune.
Is it worth the hype that Apple and cell carriers are throwing at it? Not really, but do I, as a user, enjoy a lot of the new features? For sure.
Double tap to type to Siri is great, and access to ChatGPT for answers Siri doesn’t know is much better than, “I couldn’t find the answer. Would you like me to search the internet?” And as a person with slight dyslexia and ADHD, Proofread is a fucking god send.Get it off! Get it off!!
