Apple's long-awaited and highly-anticipated Apple Intelligence feature is slated to arrive on iPhones, iPads, and Macs next week. However, not all of the features promised at its debut during Apple's Glowtime event in August will ship with the initial release.
Take the Clean Up tool, for example. Designed as an answer to Google's Magic Eraser feature, Clean Up can select and remove background assets from an image without impacting the subject of the photo. But while it can easily remove birds flying in a solid blue sky, removing an asset from more complex backgrounds, say, a Persian rug, will leave obvious visual artifacts. This is apparently intentional, not because Apple's software isn't sufficiently capable.
“People view photographic content as something they can rely on as indicative of reality,” Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of Software Engineering told Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview. “It’s important to us that we help purvey accurate information, not fantasy.”
"The demand for people to want to clean up what seems like extraneous details to the photo that don’t fundamentally change the meaning of what happened have been very, very high," he continued. "So we’ve been willing to take that small step.”
Federighi also addressed the recent delay to Apple Intelligence's release, which was slated to happen alongside the release of iOS 18 in September. He explained that the company is not looking to roll out every one of its AI capabilities on day one, but rather, is taking a long-term approach that spans years if not decades. "Apple’s point of view is more like let’s try to get each piece right and release it when it’s ready ... We’re going to do it responsibly," he said.
As for Siri, which is receiving a significant rebuild with help from OpenAI's ChatGPT, Federighi can't point to a specific where the AI assistant will be fully realized. "As humans, our expectations for what it means to use our voice to communicate and ask for things is almost unbounded," he said. "Is there going to be one moment where we say Siri is now my, you know, sentient pal? You know, no – it’s going to continue to get better and better."
Though Apple took some heat over the seeming sedate pace of its AI development and release, it certainly beats the alternative we saw with Google's panicked roll-out of Bard last year. The company lost $100 billion (with a B) in market value after its hastily released AI incorrectly answered a basic astronomy question in its television ad. Even Google's own employees decried the early version of the AI as a "pathological liar."