Apple Intelligence to Be Enabled on All Compatible Devices

I just turned off Microsoft’s AI in Word because it explicitly allows them to scrape documents prepared in Word, and I would give Apple Intelligence the same treatment if they acted the same way. It may be simpler to stay with Intel Macs.

While the immediate concern with AI is intellectual property, another very important issue is performance. I have turned off autocorrect everywhere I can find it because I suffered a disaster in preparing an edition of one my books. The autocorrect changed standard abbreviations of scientific units without asking me, so the abbreviation became either initial caps or all lower case. Kilohertz became khz instead of kHz, gigahertz became Ghz instead of GHz, and so on. As a professional writer, I wanted the final say.

My experience with AI so far is that it is only useful if you check it for accuracy. I can do that with Otter.ai, and it’s a big help in transcribing, if I listen carefully, but I caught it rounding the numbers in one interview. I want to trust the software I use to be accurate, not hallucinating or cutting corners. I don’t know exactly what Siteground did when they wrote their own spam filter, but whatever it was racked up huge numbers of false positives that messed up my dealing with clients. If tech companies are going to use AI, they should be liable for the consequences of its mistakes.

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