Thoughts on iOS 18.1 Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence has arrived for the public, and of course, I'm already on iOS 18.2 beta 2, but I wanted to take a moment to share my thoughts on what we got at launch, specifically Writing Tools. The features in Photos, system-wide summaries, and a new Focus Mode are interesting and add to the usefulness, but feel like features that could have existed before the all-encompassing "AI" term.

I'll note that system-wide summaries have been very nice. They help me save time, triage notifications and email, and even make analyzing some articles a little more simple.

If you want a more detailed overview of each of these features, read my full iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1 review at AppleInsider.

A problem with Writing Tools

The first iteration of Writing Tools focused on text transformation from a very controlled standpoint. iOS 18.2 beta 1 added the ability to type in manual prompts to transform text, like making text into a poem, which I did on an episode of the AppleInsider Podcast. I even accidentally transformed our show notes into a poem during our premium aftershow segment, but you'll have to subscribe to hear that bit.

iOS 18.2 beta 2 continues to improve the tool, baking ChatGPT directly into the UI with a new "Compose" option. That means you can now make text from scratch via ChatGPT right from any text input box in iOS – if that's your thing.

The one thing that's missing from Writing Tools is the ability to preview changes and choose which ones are made granularly. I'm speaking specifically about the Proofread function, which I now use full time instead of Grammarly. Only the Notes app gets a set of arrows to page through what was changed with an option to revert it.

I generally use Apple apps unless a third-party app offers more useful features I can take advantage of, and Apple Notes isn't exactly writer-friendly. It's great for getting small details down, but it is not great for long-form writing. So, despite having more Apple Intelligence controls, I have to stick with a third-party writing app.

Which brings me to the top image. The biggest reason I can't use Notes is the inability to change font size in the body text; however, I discovered another major issue. In Drafts, I have shortcuts baked into pasting in and formatting links, something other apps I've tried don’t have.

The third app here is IA Writer. I bring it up because it has the ability to paste text and assign changes to a named entity like AI. The pasted-in changes get a slightly different gray text color, so you can see what Apple Intelligence Proofread manipulated, for example.

So, you'd think I would want to use IA Writer full time, but no, I still miss my linking shortcuts from Drafts. That, and IA Writer's AI labeling is too subtle, so I've decided to use a random text diff service online to paste in two copies of text and have it show me what is different.

There is no reason I should have to do that. I really hope Apple can improve how Writing Tools shows changes performed by Proofread outside of Notes. Or, if Apple is buying up companies like Pixelmator, perhaps they should pay Greg Pierce a visit and buy the very excellent Drafts app.

Of course, that should be completely unnecessary, and Apple should instead supply an API for adding deeper integration with Writing Tools. While I am curious what an Apple-made plain text writing app with Shortcuts superpowers would look like, I think this is a space third-party apps will always be better. Yes, I'm aware of Pages; it's just not the tool for this job.

How Apple got AI right

I have been incredibly vocal about the so-called "Artificial Intelligence" nonsense that has spread like wildfire in recent years, and so far, I've been mostly correct. It is all hot air being peddled by investors and isn't some life-changing, potentially world-ending technology.

It's the next evolution of what started as machine learning. It may sound derogatory, but even experts say it is true – what we call AI today is basically a really good next character prediction engine. The more data it has, the more likely it will know what the next word in a sentence, pixel in an image, or frame in a video should be. That's it.

But that's not a bad thing. Even if the name is poor, the technology is quite good. It won't actually steal your jobs or lead to Terminator, but it might make your life a little easier. That said, pretty much every company invested in AI got all of their data and training by basically stealing all of the information on the internet, even Apple, even if it's less true for them.

The whole drama around Apple Bot has come and gone, and my take is simple: Apple should have told everyone what was happening the minute a decision was made, but too little too late. Apple did seemingly attempt to only crawl public, non-trademarked data if that's any consolation.

I do believe Apple is the only company doing all of this right. Not only is Apple encouraging users to create their own content before using Apple Intelligence to transform it, be it drawings, images, or text, it's all environmentally friendly too. As third-party systems like ChatGPT creep in, that emphasis on user created content is watered down, but it's still there. If you're using Apple Intelligence, you're using it on something that exists, that's on your device, and maybe something created by you.

Apple Intelligence is also excellent because it runs on the device, which is being carbon offset by Apple's 2030 program, and any requests sent off for Cloud Compute are run through 100% renewable energy-powered servers. That and all data on the device, sent to Apple, or even sent to ChatGPT, is kept completely under the user's control and ownership.

I never had a use for AI technology until Apple entered the space. I know what that sounds like, and maybe there's some fanboy nonsense in there, but it doesn't make it less true. I've discussed here and in my review how Apple Intelligence has saved me time and money, but since iOS 18.2, it's done more.

As a technologist, I've always been at least adjacently curious about what's going on with ChatGPT, but I don't like the privacy concerns, not to mention data theft and everything else. So I stayed away from them the same way I stay away from Google. However, like how Apple's private Siri identifier lets me search Google privately if DuckDuckGo fails, Apple lets me use ChatGPT without an account and without sharing data. OpenAI never even knows that I contacted them. It's excellent.

So, I've experimented with the technology when reason provides. Until today, I hadn't encountered anything beyond the simple "describe this image" or "does this text contain bias" prompts. I was writing about Apple developers getting the ability to begin using the new app intent system to provide Siri contextual information about what's being shown on display, and there was a table in Apple's documentation. 

I needed only two of the columns of data from this table presented as an HTML unordered list, and it hit me that ChatGPT might be good at this, so I sent it a screenshot via Type to Siri with a command to do just that: "Send this to ChatGPT and take data from the domain and request columns separated by a colon and generate an unordered list in HTML code." And it just worked without hallucinations.

Excellent. This is Apple at its best. Not only is this technology just built into iPhones, iPads, and Macs, it's private, secure, and green. That wasn't true until Apple got involved.

So I ask again. How exactly is Apple "behind" in AI?

Well, what I thought would be a quick post turned into a bit more than that. As always, reach out to me on Mastodon at HilliTech at TechHub.Social. This blog post is linked in this Mastodon post.