Apple Intelligence: The End of Creativity at Scale

Apple is no longer the company for creatives

I watched Apple’s WWDC keynote with my head in my hands. In the aftermath of the event, I’m having a bodily reaction to what I saw and heard: as a writer, it feels like my love affair with technology is at a crossroads. It was an odd experience, but I think others will feel the same. I may be overreacting, but I need to map out what just happened and what it might mean.

The features powered by what the company calls Apple Intelligence are technically very impressive. From creating summaries of writing, creating images, to connecting instructions between different apps to perform complex interactions through voice, there’s a hell of a lot here.

We have seen this stuff before from other companies. There’s something different here, though: Due to the company’s domain over so much of your stuff, generative machine learning on Apple’s devices promises to do many, many things in straightforward and personal ways. It also promises to surface these features to a bigger range of tech’ users. I’m afraid of the consequences and, in some cases, feel a little violated.

The keynote presentation at WWDC presented two different types of AI-powered activities. First, the usual stuff whereby machine learning does tasks that we can describe as curation…