If Apple Intelligence is so great, why doesn’t Apple trust us to turn it on?

I know the road is well-trod by now, but yes, we’re back to talk about Apple Intelligence once again. Why? Well, for better or worse, it seems to be pretty much all that Apple wants to talk about these days, and when the company has put this much time, energy, and, yes, marketing attention onto a single feature, then scrutiny is, also for better or worse, what you get.

While the features under this Apple Intelligence banner have had their fair share of problems so far—everything from inaccurate news summaries to misidentifying spouses—none of that seems to have slowed Apple’s adoption of the technology. With the news that the upcoming iOS 18.3 and macOS 15.3 updates will activate Apple Intelligence by default, the company continues to plow full speed ahead, directly into a minefield that’s also somehow replete with both asteroids and icebergs.

Apple Intelligence agency

Apple’s AI features exist in a Schrödingeresque limbo: the company continues to label them as betas (in increasingly fine print, it seems) while simultaneously using them to sell its products. Go to Apple’s website right now, and the top spot on the company’s homepage is a banner for the iPhone 16 Pro with the subtitle “Hello, Apple Intelligence.” The company is having its cake Genmoji and eating it too.

Unsurprisingly, this stems mainly from its business concerns. AI is on the tip of everyone’s tongue right now, and Apple both has to be seen to be relevant and, moreover, has to be relevant by incorporating said features. The company was caught flat-footed in the AI groundswell and has had to scramble to catch up, which means telling everybody loudly that it has now caught up, even if it hasn’t.

From a purely technological standpoint, the change to make Apple Intelligence opt-out rather than opt-in makes sense from a couple of standpoints. One, it eliminates any steps for people who have Apple Intelligence capable devices, making those features immediately available to people who might not have otherwise known they were there or spent the time figuring out how—or even if—to turn them on. As an ancillary benefit, enabling these features expands the pool of people using them, which helps the company gather analytics and metrics, in turn feeding into improving those features.

Is there a risk for Apple in making this move? Sure. Some people will be confused or unaware of what the features are doing and might end up with unexpected or misleading results, despite Apple’s attempts to provide caveats. Some people will be upset that the features were enabled without their explicit permission. (You don’t have to look far on social media these days to see similar uproars about more innocuous capabilities that people have lumped in with generative AI.) But to Apple, the benefits clearly outweigh any potential downsides.

The same can’t necessarily be said for users.

Fight for the users

Let’s start with this: I don’t believe AI features to be a total waste of time. There are obvious utilities to machine learning algorithms of the kinds that Apple has been employing for years and even generative AI and Large Language Models can be tremendously useful within certain contexts. But those technologies are also not without their costs, including everything from the unauthorized use of intellectual property to their not infrequent errors to the environmental impact.

And this is where Apple’s move to enable Apple Intelligence by default raises an eyebrow. Given the contentious nature of these features, there is understandable frustration to users immediately having their devices start utilizing this functionality without their say-so. It’s not dissimilar from Google’s recent choice to start serving up an AI overview—often with hilariously bad information—at the top of its search results. Like Apple, Google is struggling to prove its relevance in a field that risks leaving it behind, but it’s a move that I would argue has made Google’s product worse, and even cheapened their brand overall. That’s a risk for Apple too, and it’s a company that lives by its reputation more than most.

But it’s not all downside: for every person upset about Apple’s choice to automatically enable Apple Intelligence, there may be another who benefits from the addition of its proofreading tools or delights in making Genmoji, and might never have found those features had they not been on by default.

Gimme an A, gimme an I, what does it spell? A…I….dunno?

It’s not as if there isn’t precedent for this on Apple’s part. The company has long taken a paternalistic approach to its users, whether it be in swapping scrolling direction on the Mac, insisting that people held its phones wrong, or getting rid of small phones. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that the company would go down this road—but that doesn’t mean it’s not disappointing.

Like it or not, Apple Intelligence isn’t going anywhere. The company has one more set of promised features to deliver before the presumably next round is unveiled at June’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and there exists the possibility—slim, perhaps—that those capabilities might prove the whole endeavor worthwhile. But don’t be surprised if the number of Google searches for “how to turn off Apple Intelligence” start climbing—just remember that putting glue into your phone is never the answer.