There’s a common message from the world’s creative class, heard in equal parts in the whinings of emo artists and the exclamations of executive editors: AI is coming for us. And we’re all freaking terrified.
If you listen to these folks, generative AI will steal our jobs, write our headlines, and craft better songs than we ever could. It’ll play guitar like Jimi Hendrix and write bigger anthems than Taylor Swift, all while drawing doodles that would make Picasso pout. Hell, it’ll have a better potato latkes recipe than even my Aunt Helen had, and she made them just about perfect. And it will offer all this over and over and over, without worrying about royalties or fretting about fees. How can we possibly compete?
Well get ready, artists, because at WWDC 2024, Apple just threw a gauntlet onto the ground. And in Apple’s new world, gen AI isn’t coming just for you. It’s coming for your kids, your parents, your grandparents — everybody. If ever there was an AI tipping point, one where our future will be unavoidably defined by AI, it took place today. The genie is out of the bottle, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Introducing Apple Intelligence.
‘AI for the rest of us,’ says Apple
At the annual developer-focused event, Apple unveiled a full suite of AI-powered tools that promise to reshape everything the company has on offer. In the near future, AI in Apple’s products will improve your penmanship, refine your writing, blur your backdrops, and craft cooler emojis. It’ll proofread your texts, summarize and prioritize your inbox and notifications, and take better dictation. Across most of the apps you use on a daily basis, AI will be there. Doodling notes? AI will help you turn rough sketches into art. And it’ll prompt your next doodle, or suggest ideas for the subsequent slide. Like Taylor Swift and forever chemicals, AI will be simply everywhere.
And the most fascinating part? Tim Apple didn’t target artists, musicians, photographers and painters in today’s presentation, though it’s clear the same tools will be vastly more powerful in the hands of these already creative crafters. No, Apple is bringing generative AI to the hundreds of millions of ordinary people like you and me that rely on the company’s laptops, tablets, and phones to do ordinary stuff. Sending a text message? Let gen AI help. Planning a route to the mall or sorting notifications? AI and Siri have your back.
Like Taylor Swift and forever chemicals, AI will be simply everywhere.
So what will the extraordinary among us have to say?
Kelly McKernan is a successful fantasy artist with clients that include Dark Horse Comics, Stranger Things, and more. Last fall, she noticed (as many creatives did) that the programmers behind generative AI tools such as DALLE-2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney had used her works to train their models. “Honestly,” she told Creative Bloq, “I feel violated.”
I get it. I really do! But sorry, Apple says. This is the future. Get on board.
“I see things on the horizon that are very troubling,” Vernon Reid, the visionary frontman for Living Color, told Music Radar in 2023. “It’s going to have a huge impact on how music is produced, how music is consumed.”
Pandora’s box is open, Mr. Reid! And for better or worse, generative AI — fueled by the is-it-evil-is-it-great ChatGPT — is going to be in every major Apple device going forward. The world’s most popular consumer electronics maker has gone all in, sprinkling AI into the most popular tech in the world, like a dusting of confectioner’s sugar onto a tart. Don’t like sugar? Too bad, this is the dessert. You’ll eat it and you’ll like it.
Make no mistake, this isn’t an apology for AI. It very well could be a terrible thing for the world’s artists. If an infinite variety of patterns can be generated instantaneously, maybe we don’t need pattern makers. And that will surely impact people that make patterns, whatever their medium: recipes, songs, paintings, clothing, whatever.
And the cynic in me says maybe we should fight more, complain more. But it’s too late for that, especially when it makes such wonderfully distracting new emojis and pictures at the click of a mouse button. Forget about the bottle and the genie. Apple’s just thrown out the cork for good.
Protest or progress?
How can you protest against generative AI when it’s in absolutely everything? It’s easy to stand on principle with ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot: Simply don’t use those tools. I’m fine with my stuff the way it is, thank you very much.
Apple might have doubled down on exactly the thing our most creative types were most afraid of.
But Apple baked AI into absolutely everything, and it’s hard not to use your iPhone. It’s hard to say “I’m through with the Messages app.” It’s hard not to use the technology we’ve come to depend upon, which does indeed bring us closer together, and simplifies our day to day lives in myriad wonderful ways.
And I suspect those creative types who worry about the future, who fret about jobs being lost, will find themselves using these tools anyway. Their parents will send them unique emojis, auto generated from the ether. Their friends will send them images of cheshire cats driving Crayola-colored cars, whipped up on a whim. Their children will say “look at this, Siri helped me make it.”
Apple might have just made things tougher, it’s true. Apple might have doubled down on exactly the thing our most creative types were most afraid of. But Apple might have turned all of us into more creative individuals. I’m not sure exactly what iOS 18 will look like, or whether machines will come for my job; maybe I’ll soon be listening to soothing, auto-generated music while on hold with the unemployment office. But I’m optimistic: These are tools, they’ll help us make things. So let’s make things awesome, okay?
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