Why I will never use Apple “Intelligence”

updated on September 28th, 2024 at 8:56 am

Apple Intelligence is a new feature that will be coming to MacOS in Sequoia version 15.1. It is a series of generative AI tools for writing and image generation. The writing tools in particular will have a rewriting feature that will rewrite your text in different styles and fix your grammar.

I am absolutely opposed to this technology, and I will never use it. I believe it and all AI tools should be deleted from every computer. Moreover, I have already written several emails to Apple urging them to make this an optional upgrade, although of course they will ignore me.

The most important reason not to use these tools is that they are “uniformizers of humanity”, which push us towards being indiscriminate pieces in a large machine.

Ostensibly, these tools can increase the clarity of your writing or help you write things in smaller amounts of time. But the eventual result of these tools is the stripping of personality from writing. They are part of the larger philosophy of technology, which is to transform human expression into anonymous pieces for more efficient transfer of pure information. In other words, their purpose is to make us into cogs that have little individuality, because in that way, we are more useful to building technology.

Of course, we have always had various tools to help us. But as the axe is useful, and yet the atomic bomb is too much power, so too are these generative AI tools too powerful for reasonable human use. They are capable of stripping the humanity from human beings, just as the atomic bomb too easily kills.

There has always been imperfection, misunderstanding, and errors in human expression. The ultimate aim of artificial intelligence and the computerized society is to eliminate all such things. To some, that might sound good, but in reality, it ignores the fact that some imperfection is necessary, because imperfection is a crucial part of personality. The entrenchment of AI represents another step towards this process, and one of the biggest steps at that because it is almost impossible to control.

But even if you’re not interested in the destruction of human values, there are economic ones as well. The logical end of artificial intelligence is the creation of basic capability for all individuals, making them very self-sufficient. That again sounds like a good thing, but keep this in mind: there is an optimal point of self-sufficiency.

Absolute self-sufficiency is a bad thing because people will no longer rely as much on each other. The generative image AI in Apple Intelligence for example will reduce the amount of human-created graphics used in various media. That’s a seriously bad thing, because it means that we will lose our touch with the creations of other human beings. The remaining hybrid creations that heavily use AI will no longer represent the person, the augmentation of the person with the machine soul.

When it comes to self-sufficiency, AI technology increases it, and makes our only dependence the tech company. That means that ordinary people won’t need other ordinary people as much. Instead, our only dependence will be on tech companies, who will have us on puppet strings, controlling our destiny and deciding how much of the pie we will get.

All of this might seem fantastical to you. If AI just seems like another helpful tool, then you may not be wrong, at least in the short term. But the long-term outlook is inevitably the destruction of human uniqueness. It’s just hard to see the bleak when something is essentially free and increases convenience in some way. But I warn you: hold onto some inconvenience and manual work such as writing your own emails, instead of using AI to do it. Try and make your own art, instead of letting AI do it. If you succumb to using AI, then you will join the movement of the eradication of humanity.

Apple Intelligence isn’t anything unique, because there are other AI tools out there. But it is another step in the wrong direction for humanity, and it’s something we need to fight against and avoid. Thus, I strongly urge you not to use Apple Intelligence or any other AI program because it is part of a phenomenon of eroding the imperfection that makes human expression beautiful.


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