The two biggest selling points for the latest iPhone 16 were the camera control button and Apple Intelligence. Unfortunately, not only has Apple Intelligence seen a very staggered launch it is also quite clearly still a work in progress.
Apple just recently released iOS 18.2 which brought with it a handful of new AI tools that were shown off in September. The revamped Siri that everyone has been looking forward to has reportedly been delayed till 2026, long after the release of iPhone 17.
As such the current version of Siri still has trouble understanding the most basic commands and queries. Fortunately iOS 18.2 brought along integration with ChatGPT so Siri can at least offload your questions or requests to a much more competent AI model.
Notification summarization was another feature many looked forward to. Now that it’s here it’s quite obvious that it isn’t as smart as Apple said it would be. I’ve seen countless screenshots of summarized notifications on forums where Apple Intelligence is outright wrong or completely mixes up the different messages. A favorite of mine was when it told a Reddit user that their father had been in an accident which was untrue.
These sorts of moments are so common that there’s a whole new online community for it where you can share and laugh at Apple Intelligence dropping the ball.
It took a fair amount of time for iPhone users to get their hands on some of these features. | Video credit — Apple
The advertised summarization tool for webpages and documents also keeps running into trouble. A lot of the time it will just give up and tell you that it cannot summarize the given text which completely defeats the purpose of having on-demand AI assistance.And now that we finally have access to Image Playground and Genmoji — which Apple heavily advertised — we can see that both tools are severely restricted. MacRumors extensively tested the image generation in Apple Intelligence and the results are even more limited than Bing’s free access to Dall-E 3 (a popular image generation AI model).
Genmoji and Image Playground refuse to generate people most of the time and even struggle with humanoid creatures. You can’t even get the two to generate a picture of an iPhone. The most mundane concepts require a Master’s degree in prompt engineering just to get a mediocre result. This isn’t to say that Apple’s AI is completely useless. When it works it works great.
But Apple Intelligence still has a long way to go and the tools available to users are barely functional half the time. After a year of one bad software update after another Apple really needed to step up its game and this just isn’t it.
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