Apple Intelligence didn’t write this headline

Today the Macalope comes not to bury AI but to praise it.

Okay, just a little, but still.

Faithful readers of the horny one’s ribald rants might get the sense from them that the Macalope thinks AI should be hurled into the dustbin of history and taken to the garbage dump of the ages to later be burned in the incinerator of perdition. He is here to assure you that his view on AI is far more nuanced than that.

Well, more nuanced. Somewhat. A little more nuanced.

There’s definitely a measurable quantity of nuance to be found. Depending on the precision of the instruments used to do the measuring. The Macalope has not read the standards memos published by the National Board of Nuance and he’s currently unfamiliar with the tools being used in the nuance measuring industry.

They probably have AI in them.

Let’s describe the Macalope’s philosophy on AI as something that works great in certain instances and has great potential that’s being aggressively misused and over-applied.

Despite the potential, there continue to be problems. Like when Apple Intelligence is making up headlines of fake news and passing them around as real notifications.

Look, it’s no big deal, all it did was say that a boxer that lost a bout won and that a former professional tennis player came out as gay when… uh, they had not at all come out as gay in any way.

As if the disinformation age could get any worse, we now have machines churning out random, entirely wrong information on events that it had a 50/50 chance of getting right.

The boxing one. The sexuality one, that’s complicated. Well, maybe there are draws in boxing. There definitely are in sexuality.

[wink]

(The Macalope doesn’t know what that means, either.)

Whatever the case, we don’t need to worry. Apple is on it! According to the BBC, Apple is “working on a software change to ‘further clarify’ when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.”

“This person won a boxing match. (Disclaimer: Apple Intelligence has no idea who won this match, honestly. It’s so tired.)” Fantastic. Problem solved.

Tim Cook loves summaries, by the way. Or so he keeps saying. Not sure which ones he’s reading. Probably not these.

The thing is, while AI does not seem good at these tasks, there are still things it really is good at. They just happen to be defined tasks performed on defined data sets. And how’s someone supposed to get rich off of that?

AI is quite good at providing suggested solutions for technical problems. Ask it for code snippets or how to fix computer problems and it will usually come back with something helpful. Probably still best not to just cut and paste if you’re working on nuclear reactor software, but it’s definitely good enough for web work. Heck, AI has already helped at least one member of the Macalope’s family fix a computer problem without his intervention. If he can get out of the “business” of being free technical support for certain family member, so much the better.

So, is AI without merit? Quite the contrary. It’s incredibly useful… in certain, defined instances. But it should be being implemented more judiciously and not being summarily shoved into everything. Your faucet, for example, does not need AI.

To let you know how crazy that is, the Macalope just typed “ai faucet” into DuckDuckGo and was 100 percent sure he’d get a hit without having looked previously.

Also, just gonna throw it out there based on the second search he did: can someone hack these AI-powered caddies sometime soon? The Macalope really needs to see the video of golfers being chased across the fairway by them. Preferably set to “Yakety Sax”. TIA.

To highlight one of the problems with AI, these are billed as AI-powered “golf carts”, but that’s not what they are. You ride in golf carts. Because these just carry your clubs, they’re replacements for caddies, not carts. If caddies were unionized, “AI-powered scabs” would be more correct than “AI-powered golf carts”. So much of AI revolves around how to put someone out of a job.

It’s also just easy to make fun of AI. When the fruit is so low and so wonderfully ripe, what’s a mythical beast to do?

Okay, okay. The Macalope was going to say nice things about AI today. He does see great potential in AI long-term. The problem is less AI than it is the people trying to ram it into everything to make a buck. When it becomes clear what is going to work and what isn’t–basically when the technology becomes as boring as touch screens and tapping to pay for something–maybe we can enjoy it more.