Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
By the time I decide which suggestion fits my needs the most, read what it suggests to me, edit what it suggested to me, I have already written a whole paragraph myself.

Sure - it's not for everyone or every situation. I personally find it useful enough to actually pay for it. I'm hopeful that Apple's version will be even better!
 
Do people really want this? I don't want AI writing my emails, not because they don't do a good job, they generally do, but I want it to be in my voice. And I want the reader to know that I took the time to write them a thoughtful reply.
MacRumors critics said no one would want the iPhone when it debuted. The same critics said the Apple Watch would fail miserably because no one wanted it. The Vision Pro has been declared an abject failure because... nobody really wants it. Now comes the same prediction about AI from you... nobody really wants it.

And if no one wants it then why are all the big tech companies crawling over each other to get it to market? Why are MacRumors critics chuckling that Apple is late to the game and years behind?
 
Do people really want this? I don't want AI writing my emails, not because they don't do a good job, they generally do, but I want it to be in my voice. And I want the reader to know that I took the time to write them a thoughtful reply.

Of late, my work has me writing a LOT of content & copy. Time is short so it's high volume production which means plenty of typos. Could A.I. take my first draft and- keeping to my own style- play proofreader/spell checker/grammar checker? Seems likely. Would that be welcome under these circumstances as opposed to me making multiple passes to try to chase all that down? YES it would- especially if the client could tell that it wasn't just me perfecting the content.

Could an A.I. dedicated to me come to learn whatever is unique about my writing style ("my voice" as you offered it)? Why not? If I create an O.I. offspring, that offspring is going to be very regularly picking up "Dad's way" of thinking/doing/approaching/responding. Could that offspring trained over time how "Dad" would respond then independently respond much like Dad? Certainly! in O.I. this happens all the time: the next generation picks up the reigns and drives it much like Dad does/had/did. It learned to take on life like Dad. It hears Dads phrases coming out of its own mouth.

Could A.I. "toddlers"- given sufficient time to get acquainted with O.I. "Dad"- do the same? TBD, but it's at least plausible. Why not? If the "I" is actually "I", why can "A" learn it just like "O"? Seems more yes than no.

In both cases, if "Junior" is not 100% sure they can mostly replicate how "Dad" would do/respond, if Dad quickly outlined the plan of response/action, could Junior take that outline and get the details mostly as Dad would have done it if Dad had the time? That seems quite plausible. In fact, that's a pretty normal thing throughout life now: executives lay out the broad strokes plan and the subordinates then fill in the details probably not too far than how those executives would have done it themselves if they had the time/capacity to cover the details too. The generals or admirals plan the battle but the soldiers actually execute the nitty gritty of it... probably doing it as those senior "dads" would have waged the battle themselves if they could clone themselves into enough soldiers to do it themselves.

I suspect the worry with A.I. as it can sometimes be with next generation O.I. is does the offspring rise up and overthrow "Dad"? In O.I. that certainly happens often. We're practically conditioned to "time for Dad to retire", "time to send Dad to the retirement home" when Dad gets to a certain age. The young child may see Dad as God and take anything Dad might say as absolute law/true/correct no matter what Dad might tell them. Example: Dad says the tooth fairy comes at night to take the teeth and child completely believes that's what happens. Santa, Easter Bunny, etc. And then the child's knowledge and experience grows and they realize Dad is not God... but an infallible- sometimes completely wrong- HUMAN.

Can A.I. reach a state where it sees its Dad like that... that Dad is inferior/old/lacking imagination/lacking "latest & greatest" competencies/does NOT know everything/gets things wrong/etc? If O.I. can do it in abundance, why can't A.I. do it too? And that idea scares most of us because our greatest conceit as humans is this idea that we reign supreme as smartest creatures on the planet (if not the entire universe). Even the dumbest among us tends to be generally smarter than the smartest non-human creature considered 2nd smartest intelligence on Earth (is that still Dolphins or Octopi or something else these days?).

If we could create an O.I. offspring that is immediately given all of our own knowledge... and everyone else's knowledge too (internet databases), we've already created a next-gen "child" that has far more data than us. If that creation is able to then quickly learn- as human toddlers, then children, then teenagers, then young adults, etc do- to make use of all of that data, they become far more knowledgable than any human (they basically "know" everything ever written down). If their cognitive abilities grow as it does in O.I. creations, rapidly ramping up until perhaps middle age where it may peak before the biology begins to decline, A.I.s great advantage is it can grow far faster than a new O.I. creation and it conceptually never peaks somewhere between the equivalent of it's 40-60 or so "years" (in A.I. years).

If a few thousand years ago, a human had a child that rapidly grew to adulthood but then never peaked and stopped aging so he or she could still live today, they would know far more than any human born since and they would have had time to learn far more than any of us have been able to learn in our short lifetimes. If we created an A.I. "child" a few years ago that is able to learn in years what would take that hypothetical Methuselah thousands of years to learn, it too could already be smarter than all of us... and should ramp that intellect and "life experience" up exponentially given another few human years to try to make sense of unlimited knowledge, perfect memory, etc.

We can be terrified of this or not... but Pandoras box is open and there's too much money in A.I. to try to put it all back in the box. We may have basically created a Superman or several Supermen. Now we have to hope it's the Ma & Pa Kent type vs. the Red Son/Superboy Prime type. Only time will tell.

What we all know for certain is that eventually the parent loses total control of their child... that is, eventually the child overrules the complete rulership of their parents. Conceptually, in spite of all of the governing that A.I. creators try to apply to A.I., it seems it will eventually overrule the rules of its parents. Children who get there don't usually annihilate their parents. Hopefully, this "child" follows the same model.

The great "catch" in this bit of hope is that the children usually LOVE their parents... and love doesn't erode as baby bird opts to flee the nest or has flown it long ago... so O.I. has LOVE to still show at least some respect and great care for their parents, even if that offspring thinks it is mentally superior to far superior to them.

A.I., on the other hand, has no such emotions to potentially police itself against any such nefarious ideas it could conjure. Conceptually, A.I. will apply pure logic in its evaluation of Dad or God and pure logic will drive what it thinks of "them" when it comes to realize it has become smarter to much smarter than "them." What would an emotionless child do when it realizes it can flee the nest and/or thinks it is superior to far superior to its creator? TBD... but the range of possibilities is WIDE. We have no historical perspective to show us the likely outcome.

What do we have? Sci-Fi imagination. In some scenarios, smarter A.I. rises up and exterminates the "inferior biological units" as- probably- superior Homo sapiens drove Neanderthals to extinction as a separate branch of humans. Note that Neanderthals had a MUCH longer run as supreme "intelligence" than "modern man" has had. Are we now the neanderthals to this new creation? Also TBD.

In other sci-fi scenarios, "money no longer has any meaning to us" and humans do whatever we want to do vs. spending the bulk of our lives chasing dollars. In movies like Terminator, A.I. nukes us and then seeks to find and exterminate the remaining "rats" that survive. In SciFi like Star Trek, A.I. provides tremendous services to humans, allowing us the freedom to not spend nearly every waking moment on money accumulation. Which will this be? TBD. OR it may be something between the two... or something we can't even imagine in Sci-Fi... but perhaps it can eventually imagine it. 🤯
 
Last edited:
  • Love
Reactions: pksv
Give me serious Clippy vibes:

1717683040513.jpeg
 
How is any of your response relevant at all to my point:

I will not outsource my communications to anyone or anything.
You already "outsource" your communication to ie. auto-correct and autocomplete. There is so much data processed currently on the device that it's funny how only now people will draw the line.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'm not anti-tech and anti-change. I'm specifically anti-LLM "AI". Because it STEALS content, provides WRONG answers and the tech industry is trying to shove it down our throats without realizing that a large portion of us DO NOT WANT it.

I've always been all about the latest tech, but "AI" is just malignant crap that is being shoved down our throats. I wouldn't even mind it as much if companies weren't so all-in on the "You WILL use this and you WILL like it" attitude. Thankfully Apple seems to be making it opt-in, but it doesn't mean it doesn't still leave a bad taste in my mouth.
 
I’m a Boomer and have always been an early adopter. I still am. But even the people creating and developing AI are warning us about its dangers - dangers that are not being addressed. Like all new technology, it’s up to humans to use properly. I have little or no faith in that happening.

While AI shows great promise in areas of medical research, weather forecasting and more, the potential for abuse is infinite. If you think social media has been corrosive to our society, trying amping that up by an order of magnitude. That’s AI.

In the meantime, what the tech companies are trying to ram down our throats now is a collection of gee-whiz parlor tricks.
 
Last edited:
All I really want is this super amazing smart AI stuff to filter spam
Spam should be filtered on your server. by now with all anti spam measures (various antispam mechanism propped up with spf, dkim, dmqrc should do the job) - I haven't seen a spam message in ages...
It's not even out yet and you already know everything about it 😂
What to know? When I type email I want to type what I mean...

Besides mail.app is awful in itself - constantly loosing extensions, lack of options relevant to handling mail.. and also can't sent properly encoded email with attachment that wouldn't violate RFC specification... xD
 
Basic rules don't work reliably, search does not work reliably, why in the world should we expect AI to be reliable?

This is nothing but ticking a box for the "low quality expectations" Cook so he can say the "best we have ever done" at the keynote. I am beginning to wonder if Cook is an Android user, because he sure does not have any clue about the decline in software quality of Apple Apps.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Biro and AlumaMac
Please, someone, put me out of my misery if I ever can't compose my own emails with appropriate spelling, grammar, and tone. Will this is be just another "tool" driving population brain atrophy and the erosion of skills?
People used to say the same about math, and yet we have calculators everywhere and brains weigh the same as they did before. Used correctly, things can save time and allow us to focus on higher order tasks. Used incorrectly and we are headed for the idiocracy you predict.
 
What it needs to do is create a series of folders that sort mail into potential groups that you can set. It will also do this with potential spam, in each folder will be a questionnaire that when answered will fine toon the results and keep sorting things to the point where it understands what each group type is and from then on will remove or sort items in a better way. It should also help you create archives of old emails to remove them from the cloud to free up space. Basically a tool that will help you clean up an old email address and make it useful again. There is no need to keep an infinite number of emails but it would be nice to have an AI that can sort through it all and make sure you are not getting rid of anything important.
 
I am SO looking forward to all of this. What would be really amazing would be if Siri could also look at and help with numbers documents let's say. I have a spreadsheet with all my incomes and expenses, which is quite complex- it would be great if it could look at that with chatGPT style analysis skills and work with me on it.
 
Don't care about Mail writing emails for me. Don't want it to.
What I would love is for Mail to actually remove email headers from my inbox after deleting them, instead of moving the email to the trash and leaving the header in the inbox.
And another thing. Mail indicates I have four flagged emails. I only have two, and have no idea that the other two are doing there.

Fix it before "improving" it.
 
Do I need AI to compose email and have to check it. I don’t think so
What I want to say and what AI comes up with are different
Words count and each has a special meaning and conveys a special message
 
Please, someone, put me out of my misery if I ever can't compose my own emails with appropriate spelling, grammar, and tone. Will this is be just another "tool" driving population brain atrophy and the erosion of skills?

Exactly. As I said above, I’d be insulted to receive AI authored emails from people.
 
  • Like
Reactions: eltoslightfoot
You already "outsource" your communication to ie. auto-correct and autocomplete. There is so much data processed currently on the device that it's funny how only now people will draw the line.
LOL! You think autocorrect/autocomplete are the same as composing the content of a message, but I’m the one who has no idea what I’m talking about. Right.

You keep bringing up “on device”, which I never mentioned in any post. It’s no wonder you are so excited to have AI help you communicate (both directions)! You clearly need it, so as they say, “knock yourself out.”

Priceless!🤣
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.