Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Intelligence? Other artificial intelligence services? Or do you avoid all that?
- Thread starter crococarbs
- Start date
-
- Tags
- apple intelligence
- Sort by reaction score
I use AI for some big analysis that a phone isn’t suitable for. My use cases on the phone are different than these big analysis. I would like Siri to be better, but I’m not really able to speak to Siri most of my day. So I would have to use type to Siri. I do like the summaries of my messages and emails.
I mostly use local LLMs to help brainstorming the story I’m writing. I primarily use local ones because online ones tend to be more censored/biased, which is no friend to creativity.
I have, from time to time, used ChatGPT, Grok, and DuckDuckGo’s implementation, but this is primarily for general purpose stuff. If I don’t need latest information, I stay away from them.
I’ve tried using Apple’s “Writing Tools” to summarise scenes from my story, but it doesn’t like to do it...
… making it all but useless for my purposes. Other LLMs are perfectly happy to do it. I find Apple’s approach too restrictive.
I have, from time to time, used ChatGPT, Grok, and DuckDuckGo’s implementation, but this is primarily for general purpose stuff. If I don’t need latest information, I stay away from them.
I’ve tried using Apple’s “Writing Tools” to summarise scenes from my story, but it doesn’t like to do it...
… making it all but useless for my purposes. Other LLMs are perfectly happy to do it. I find Apple’s approach too restrictive.
When I do, it is research. Bought subscription for Perplexity but switched to ChatGPT
And just one a day or less, but it is conversational. Better question yields good in-depth answers. Can chat for 30 minutes on a topic.
And just one a day or less, but it is conversational. Better question yields good in-depth answers. Can chat for 30 minutes on a topic.
Pretty much my same experience with Apple Intelligence, also with ChatGPT I asked a few questions and so many inaccuracies and some plain wrong facts, I maybe lasted like 10mins with that and also thought it was useless and gave up.
My peers tell me that coding assistant AIs do help so dunno *shrugs*.
Can AI go through lines of code and output in plain language what each function does? I imagine it would make debugging a lot easier. Heck, I would be able to debug if what I'm reading suddenly makes me feel dyslexic.
Programming is basically writing so that a machine can understand it. AI would basically translate code into a language regular folks can understand, ie automatically add comments to code. If the code has errors, it would easier to spot.
Programming is basically writing so that a machine can understand it. AI would basically translate code into a language regular folks can understand, ie automatically add comments to code. If the code has errors, it would easier to spot.
I routinely use Apple Intelligence for proofreading. I find it very useful. I mucked around with other AI for a while to learn what the hype is all about, but image generation is entirely useless for me, and ChatGPT, Claude, Gemma, Llama, etc., are wrong so often that they're worse than useless. Using them increases the amount of time it takes to do anything because you have to go and double-check all the output!
I’ve done this in a small way recently.
There was a small script I found on the ‘net I wanted to try out but, just to be safe, I threw it at Grok and it came back with a line-by-line account of what it does.
For my own use, I’ve been playing about with rsync and I have a backup.sh script I’ve been modifying. I made a bunch of changes, but made some basic mistakes. Rather than wade through it to fix it, I again threw it at Grok. It not only found my errors, but also provided me with a complete script “fixed” and ready to go.
Saved me a fair bit of time.
Every time my log file shows an error, I again ask Grok “what does this error mean?”. It comes back with an explanation and several ways of fixing it.
If I was doing a lot of coding (which I did years back but not so much today), I’d definitely leverage AI as I go along. Not just for debugging, but also as a learning tool. Finding some code that you’re unsure about and asking AI what it does is a lot quicker and easier than Googling it all.
I don't use any AI services and quite frankly feel kind of lost when it comes to some of the things I see others talking about using it for.
I do have an idea for an illustrated children's book that I would like to write and have thought that maybe using AI to help me create illustrations for it might be something that I could do, but I have no clue where to start.
What I would like to be able to do would be to draw a rough sketch (very rough, as drawing is not a talent I was born with), and then have the AI program create a refined image of it. Then I would like to be able to input text of things I would like edited, such as say change the fur color on an animal from brown to black, and have it update the image. I tried doing something like this when Apple released the Image Wand on the iPads, but honestly some of the images it conjured up were horrible.
I do have an idea for an illustrated children's book that I would like to write and have thought that maybe using AI to help me create illustrations for it might be something that I could do, but I have no clue where to start.
What I would like to be able to do would be to draw a rough sketch (very rough, as drawing is not a talent I was born with), and then have the AI program create a refined image of it. Then I would like to be able to input text of things I would like edited, such as say change the fur color on an animal from brown to black, and have it update the image. I tried doing something like this when Apple released the Image Wand on the iPads, but honestly some of the images it conjured up were horrible.
I use Intelligence and ChatGPT for very different things. For me, Intelligence works very well "in the gaps" (esp. "make a table") whereas I use ChatGPT for more generative tasks.
I use ChatGPT for a lot of stuff (casual research, help on homework, etc.). Apple Intelligence is to stupid to do any of it.
I use ChatGPT, Apple AI is useless. I use ChatGPT for all sorts of things like converting dimensions or checking over long PO's for duplicate orders. It is simple, works well and is conversational. So I can ask a question and carry on, or in case of converting feet to inches or something else, after I ask the base question I can simple type in numbers and it knows what I want. Apple AI is just like a freebie demo version of AI with limited features. I am sure it will get better in time, but will it surpass the other guys or always stay a few steps behind as they improve.
I use both Gemini and ChatGPT, and I’ve noticed that Gemini is getting smarter by the day. Just two weeks ago, I asked Gemini about an author who writes in a native Indian language. Back then, it couldn’t understand my question at all—it didn’t seem familiar with the name. ChatGPT, on the other hand, gave me the answer right away.
But here’s the interesting part: a few days ago, I asked Gemini the same question again, and this time it had no trouble answering. It’s impressive to see how fast it’s learning and improving.
But here’s the interesting part: a few days ago, I asked Gemini the same question again, and this time it had no trouble answering. It’s impressive to see how fast it’s learning and improving.
I use Perplexity for AI-enhanced search and the excellent BoltAI app on macOS for various tasks. BoltAI offers numerous features that enhance my productivity. Recently, I've also started using Apple Intelligence, primarily for the "Proofread" and "Rewrite" features. I find that I can access these features more quickly using keyboard shortcuts compared to BoltAI. In BoltAI, the shortcut opens a window with a prompt and the revised text. I then need to copy the revised text to the clipboard, close the temporary window, and paste it into the target field. In contrast, I've created some shortcuts in Apple Intelligence that display the revised text immediately. As a result, I only need to click on "Replace" to accept the revised text, which is faster for me.
I forgot to mention that I use BoltAI with the OpenRouter API. This means I only pay for OpenRouter credits and can access various models, including OpenAI, Antrophic, Gemini, and more. For most tasks, I use Claude Opus 4, which is incredibly expensive but incredibly powerful.