Opinion: Why does Apple hate AI?

The Star

7 hours ago

I would have gotten this post to you sooner, but I had to keep telling Google that I didn't want AI to write it for me, or clean it up, or summarise it, or turn it into a Joe chatbot.
I mean every single time I try to do something productive these days, I have to tell my devices that I don't want their help.
– No, don't help me write this document.
– No, don't summarise this email.
– No, don't respond to this text.
– No, I don't want 99 cents off my sandwich.
– No, I have no interest in applying for that job.
If these little forced AI prompts were droids, I'd be fresh out of restraining bolts.
The race for AI market share is exhausting for us consumers and business customers. Big companies and small companies alike can't stop shoving AI into the things they've already sold us to sell us more things we don't need.
Come on, Google, if I open a thousand empty Google docs and each time I ignore your prompt to let AI fake my work, maybe the one-thousand-and-first time you don't give me the prompt.
Freaking learn.
But where's Apple in this race? Why does Apple hate AI?
What follows is all reckless speculation—you've been warned. But maybe Apple sees all this irritation, and maybe the reason why they're so 'late to the AI party' is because they're looking at the AI belief bell curve—which I doubt, because it's something I just made up.
The AI belief bell curve
I did an 'invent-some-AI' thing with some smart folks 15 years ago, and that worked out kinda well. I've been playing around with AI ever since, because my career has been built on pulling insights out of data and I like doing that.
Thus, I've been mucking about with what we're calling AI for a long time, and writing about AI for well over a decade, pretty seriously for the past five years.
I've developed what I call the AI belief bell curve.
It's based on somewhat quantifiable but mostly anecdotal evidence of all the people I've worked with, all the people I've talked to, and all the people who read what I write – which, if you're unfamiliar with my writing, always walks a fine line between admiring the sheer awesome evolution of processing speed and math that we call AI, and calling out the snake-oil sales pitch of AI being the single answer to all the problems.
The data I've gathered is not statistically significant, but it's clear.
On one low end of this bell curve – I don't care which end – is the relatively small number of people who believe that all of AI is a big lie and it will eventually sputter out like NFTs and pet rocks.
On the other low end are the shrinking number of people who believe that the singularity is already here and we just can't put our finger on how to flip the switch, but it's going to happen in a couple of weeks/months/years/any minute now.
And then in that big lump in the middle, there's me and you, continually confused and gobsmacked by the gaps between the science and the sales pitch.
This bell curve has almost literally frozen the tech industry in its tracks, outside of a handful of companies – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc – that have a vested interest, and I mean 'vested' in the very literal sense of that word, in turning AI into the new user interface for the Internet, and thus the entire world's information store.
And I would also debate whether that could happen and whether the Internet is a viable knowledge base in the first place. Have you lifted the protective liner on the world wide web? It's a festering mess under there.
So maybe Apple sees this and they're like, 'Yeah, you all already did this with spreadsheets in the 1990s. We'll wait it out. Here's a god-awful UI redesign to get you talking about us again.'
In some seriousness
It's killing me. Every time I start a new paragraph there's Google with 'Help me write.'
Look. I don't know what Apple's strategy is here. And I don't hold them in church-like reverence. I have a MacBook Pro and a Pixel phone, which is the opposite of the cool kids. So if you don't want to listen to me, I don't blame you.
But I'm old enough to remember that the first smartphone came out in the mid-1990s and Apple released the iPhone in 2007.
What's in your pocket?
And of course Apple is stumbling catching up to the current crop of cool kids. They always have. Jobs got fired in 1985. Apple launched a streaming network that people were initially calling 'expensive NBC' years before NBC launched its own expensive NBC.
I'm just saying I wouldn't bet against Apple when they're late to a party. They usually bring a keg and plop it down right on someone's warm six pack. Then everyone cheers and fist pumps and the music gets a lot louder.
Is Apple AI for real?
Define real.
Because while everyone's asking why it's taking Apple so long, the harder question is, what if they sit this one out? They sat out social networks. How's that business going? TikTok, put your hand down, I'm asking everyone, even though I'm looking directly at Google.
Social media is neither social nor media, it's just a self-perpetuating advertising machine.
Were NFTs ever assets?
Is artificial intelligence actually intelligence?
Those are the harder questions and they haven't been answered yet.
But one of these days, that big lump in the middle of the AI belief bell curve is going to make up its collective mind. I can tell you right now that it won't lean either to 'big lie' or 'living thing.'
When we get there, and we get past all the ill will generated from AI screaming at us to do more things for us, the tech industry will thaw. Expect Apple to play. Or not. If they do, it probably won't look like what we're seeing now.
Is that a good thing? I don't know. Are you excited about Liquid Glass?
I wanted to make a lot more jokes in this post, but Gemini couldn't come up with anything funny. – Inc./Tribune News Service