What the latest iPhone will reveal about Apple and AI

Apple’s AI iPhone is finally about to arrive. Today, at 10am local Pacific time, the tech giant’s executives will take to a stage at its campus in California and finally give an answer to a question the world has been asking for the past 18 months.

- ANDREW GRIFFIN

It will finally open up on what it is going to do with artificial intelligence.

We have a pretty good idea of what that answer will be, from rumours, reports and gossip. It appears that Apple’s plan is to bring AI – which it might refer to as Apple Intelligence – to as many products and as much of its operating system as possible, infusing it across its technologies in subtle and not so subtle ways.

That will include new tools that allow devices to summarise large and complicated data, for instance – offering recaps of web pages and long message threads. Siri will be improved so that it is better to talk to and can do more with those conversations, such as operating parts of the phone. It might also include potentially more controversial plans, such as tie-ups with OpenAI and new features that require data to be sent off the device to servers elsewhere.

The actual desire among normal consumers for these AI features still remains largely untested. ChatGPT might be the fastestgrowing app in history, but it was free, and many people may have simply been using it for fun. Apple is in the inconvenient situation of actually having to sell its products to customers, and so has the awkward task of being a major test of whether people actually want them.

It will be doing so at a tough time for public perception of AI. Some 18 months ago, when ChatGPT was still fresh, the conversation about AI was all excitement – even the fears that were discussed were largely about it being simply too powerful and good, and destroying or incapacitating humanity as a result. Now, the long-promised revolution in society is yet to arrive, and describing something as being AI-powered is as likely to give the sense that it is a tawdry and potentially unethical knockoff as it is of being a sci-fi thrill.