I haven't installed the iOS or iPadOS 18 beta software. This will come as a surprise to no one. After all, I'm not a developer. I'm not a reviewer. I'm not a Podcaster, YouTuber, or similar Creative who needs to generate content on a regularly scheduled basis.
But I am interested. So, I read, listen, and watch the material being created by reviewers, podcasters, and YouTubers.
Given the public interest in AI, I can understand why these creators keep their focus on Apple Intelligence and whether any signs of it have appeared in the betas. It's their job to let us know if it has or hasn't.
What I am trying to think through is what to make of what often follows in these beta reports: Updates on what new machine learning features have arrived.
While these features are not part of what has been branded as Apple Intelligence. But they are features that draw on artificial intelligence.
I bring this up not to try and shame the content creators struggling to keep up with a fast changing story. By and large, they are doing good work. Rather, I want to highlight how the most significant features and changes AI will bring may be invisible to users.
For those of us trying to make sense of a future that includes generative AI, LLMs, and other machine learning advances, trying to capture these changes clearly for our audiences while various corporations and scholarly communities introduce language that segments the field is no simple task. Nor is it an insignificant one. Trying to explain to colleagues that they should be attentive to these developments involves understanding a continuum of technology — one that spell check and predictive text already has them on — obligates them to grapple with the fuzzy lines branding draws.
I'd love to conclude with a neat and tidy solution as to how to make it clear and comprehensible that Scribble (which I am using to write this post), text smoothing (available in the iPadOS 18 betas), and Apple Intelligence are connected yet distinct. If I could do that, I would be more able to tease out how and where Generative AI could be best employed land best not employed) in the brainstorming, organizing, outlining, drafting, editing, proofreading, publishing continuum of the writing process as a tool for creation and learning.
Creating and learning to create are two very different things. And I absolutely believe that going back to Blue Books is not the answer. Don't laugh. I know colleagues who have been advocating for that for well over a decade. Several years ago, it was because BlueBooks keep students from accessing the internet while they write, making our assessment results more neat even if they are likely to never exist in a world where they can’t access the internet. Now, of course, it’s to make sure they don’t hand in generated text.
But if we aren't going back to Blue Books, and we want to keep a general public informed about what AI can (and can’t) do, we have to figure out how to make the differences between the expressions of machine learning more approachable.