We’re all circling. We’re not listening. We should be reading.
Everything changes. Everything remains the same. Damnit. With that said, here is this week’s Sunday Morning Reading with links to articles worth sharing and perhaps pondering over. There’s a bit of satire, a golden toilet heist, and the evolving nature of a piece from draft to final polish. And, yes, there is politics. Everything changes. Everything remains the same. Damnit.
Let’s kick off with Tina He and The Last Human Choice. That link is to the final version of the story. I also strongly encourage you to check out the draft version she shared here.
Mark Jacob always has a great look at the media, especially in this moment, In this one he examines When The Media Take MAGA Liars At Their Word. I mentioned to Mark that what infuriates me is not just the media taking him at his word–ignorance and stupidity know no bounds–but that they know better and report it out as if they don’t.
Bringing my words at the topfull circle, NatashaMH once again delves deep into the personal past through a contemporary moment (her reaction to the streaming hit Adolescence) in A Requiem For My Dreams. I’ll close with a quote from her piece about the series that applies to everything, everywhere all at once:
People say the series is about a new world that’s happening. Fuck that, ignoramuses. It’s about a world that has always been out there behind closed doors when ears weren’t listening
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
Trust is not an easy thing to earn. It’s far easier to burn. When it catches fire, it quickly consumes whatever is in its path. Such a conflagration is made worse when it singes those who have long cozied up, supported, and promulgated that trust as their own. Apple and those who make a living covering the company are both fighting a fire neither can put out without the other, regardless of what caused Apple’s rush to market whatever Apple Intelligence and the new personalized Siri was supposed to be.
The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.
You could say it starts and stops there. You wouldn’t be wrong.
WWDC 2024 changed all that and gave me hope that Apple was in the AI race, but there were worrisome signs even back then that because, well, it was Apple, I chose to ignore or forgive.
It’s clear Apple must radically rethink its reason for being.
The heat on Apple has been smoldering for some time now with smoke in the air, wafting on a number of fronts. While I’m not pointing fingers and criticizing Apple pundits directly, (they were misled in my view), they’ve carried a lot of water for Apple, keeping these other recent flare-ups from burning too hot.
I’ve written about this Apple Intelligence episode previously, but to recap the particulars: Apple announced its flavor of Artificial Intelligence at last year’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), carving out a fire line to slow down the burning narrative that it was behind and possibly missing the moment with AI. Boldly branding it as Apple Intelligence, the key reveal was unveiling a more personalized Siri, that unlike all of the other AI efforts on the market, would give users “AI For The Rest Of Us,” that would retain the firewall of Apple’s marketing mantra of being more secure and private.
Turns out it was a reveal that wasn’t really a reveal, but has now proven all too revealing.
As has been typical with new operating system features the last few years, Apple was clear at WWDC that some of this newness would roll out over the course of the year, so there was no surprise there. Also typical since COVID is that Apple’s announcement was a canned commercial.
Atypical, however, none of the flashier features were ever shown to pundits and journalists, even under cover of an NDA. As Gruber and others are now saying, that smoky smell reeks of vaporware.
Each year Apple faces some degree of heat as it heads into WWDC. I think things will be hotter than most this year with a higher degree of skepticism. What we’re witnessing is a landscape built by years of trust, earning the benefit of doubt, turned to ashes. They say that hell has no fury like a woman scorned, but I’m here to tell you that might take second place when it comes to torching the trust relationship between a company’s PR reps and those who cover them.
Let’s talk about that trust.
Back in my gadget blogging days for GottaBeMobile.com the first rule of thumb was always be skeptical of PR. I’ve been on both sides of that fence, pushing out PR for my own projects and covering it for others. A PR pro tells you the story they want you to cover. Covering that story, you look for the holes in addition to covering it. By and large most of the well know Apple pundits have done a reasonably good job of revealing those holes in my opinion.
Apple was different in that for the most part if they made a claim it usually held up. I remember distinctly when the first iPad was released with a claimed battery life of 10 hours. Those of us at GBM were surprised when those claims proved accurate once we had the devices in our hands. Promise made. Promise fulfilled. Trust earned.
No company is perfect, certainly not Apple. But Apple has been reasonably consistent for most of the time I’ve been covering or using their hardware and software. There have been lapses — Siri being a prime example — but nothing that wasn’t overcome and perhaps, now in retrospect, wrongly overlooked because of the trust Apple built with the media and enthusiasts who covered the company. As most now realize, the smoke and mirror show of last year’s WWDC Apple Intelligence announcement was a red flag warning that needed more scrutiny than relying on trust banked through good will and follow through.
It’s currently being endlessly debated whether or not this failure was caused by a rush to satisfy Wall Street deep in its AI bubble, poor leadership, or just trying to climb too high a mountain too fast in an attempt to create a technical solution that, as announced, would one up those already on the market. In the end I don’t think it matters much what exactly sparked this blaze. I do think it matters how Apple chooses to put out the fire. Those who cover Apple, and more importantly users, feel scorched. I’m guessing there are some in Cupertino feeling that as well.
Burn scars don’t heal well or quickly.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
It has been inevitable for some time that Apple was going to delay launching whatever the new personalized Siri with Apple Intelligence was supposed to be. To expect otherwise was as foolish as hoping the new American government wasn’t going to wreak havoc on its own citizenry and the rest of the world after the most recent election.
Now Apple has owned up to the inevitable. In a statement to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber announced the delay and a new set of expectations:
“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
Note that last sentence includes “we anticipate.” I anticipate dying at some point. I also anticipate warmer days this summer, rain occasionally, and eating pizza on some day in the future. So, the message is stay tuned.
I have several thoughts on this and I’ll lay them out below, along with links to some interesting hot takes following the announcement, some of which have already cooled off a bit.
First, I think Apple was smart to make this announcement even if everyone paying attention already knew this was going to be the case. This delay wasn’t and isn’t news. That said, the announcement comes after Apple, generally perceived as rushing to catch up in the push for Artificial Intelligence, has made what can only be called a poor first impression. Sure, you can call Apple Intelligence a beta if you want. Apple does. But advertising a flawed beta as the tent pole to push new iPhones can’t be called anything but a marketing misfire, if not malpractice.
First impressions of shipping products matter more than clever shiny announcements of things yet to come.
Apple should know this because they are no strangers to bad first impressions. MobileMe left a bad stain that iCloud still has difficulty erasing. The VisionPro continues struggling with poor perception and reception. Yes, Apple also does have a history of turning some poorly received rollouts around. The best examples of that are Apple Maps and the Apple Watch. Even so, once a product launched becomes a product laughed at, it’s difficult to erase the echos of that laughter.
But perhaps the product ridiculed crucially here is the one that Apple married to this all out AI effort: Siri. Purchased, proudly launched, and then allowed to wallow — like too many other of Apple’s efforts (*cough* iPadOS *cough*), Siri has become not just a joke, but one that keeps on giving. Some say it has improved. I’ll agree with that to a point but that depends on the day.
Siri has never fulfilled Apple’s bold promises with any consistent value beyond setting a timer or adding a reminder. Even that fails enough of the time to earn users’ distrust and provide late night comedians with jokes so easy to make that the shrewder jokesters have moved on.
The debate following this recent Apple announcement in pundit circles seems to be on whether or not Apple should jettison Siri and start from scratch. I’m sure that debate has gone round and round in the circular halls of the Apple campus. I doubt that happens, given that the marketing mavens in Cupertino seem to be erratically driving the bus these days. There’s been a huge investment in Siri branding, problematic as it has always been. Unfortunately salvaging a brand is also expensive.
Apple’s Long Game Mindset Might Just Be Short Sighted
The success of the iPhone has given Apple the benefit of playing a long game, plotting product and growth strategy with a large enough cushion to weather the occasional storm. It’s certainly easier to sail through rough seas in a large ship, but the bigger the boat, the more maintenance is required to keep the hull from rusting and the engines running smoothly. The nuts and bolts matter.
Artificial Intelligence, regardless of what company is pushing it, is nuts and bolts, bits and bytes, ones and zeros. Everyone scanning the horizon thinks this is the future we’re sailing towards, full steam ahead. But nothing that’s been released or demonstrated yet has really proven that anyone can chart a correct course. The current moment resembles that scene in Jaws when all the ships set out in an armada to chase a bounty, not knowing really what they’re up against.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Artificial Intelligence may indeed prove useful. Someday. On an enterprise level. I’m just not so sure if it will ever be as big a deal on the consumer front as the marketers want us to believe it is or will be.
I also doubt Apple Intelligence will end up being another Butterfly Keyboard, MobileMe, or Siri, but at the moment there’s as good a shot of it joining the ranks of those jokes in Apple lore as there is for it becoming a success, much less useful.
Ian Betteridge in this piece, lays out what I think the AI true believer vision is in this excerpt:
But AI presents a fundamentally different challenge. This isn’t merely a new product category to be perfected – it’s a paradigm shift in how humans interact with technology. Unlike hardware innovations where Apple could polish existing concepts, AI is redefining the entire computing experience, from point-click or touch-tap to conversations. The interface layer between humans and devices is transforming in ways that might render Apple’s traditional advantages increasingly irrelevant.
He also captures the key context that reveals the tension between the long and short game as Apple has historically played it in this excerpt from earlier in that post:
Apple has long been characterised as a “fast follower” rather than a pioneering innovator. It wasn’t the first to make an MP3 player, smartphone, or even a personal computer. This strategy served Apple brilliantly in the past – observing others’ mistakes, then delivering exquisitely refined products with unmatched attention to design, usability, and integration. The first iPhone wasn’t novel in concept, but revolutionary in execution because it had a unique interface: multitouch. In fact, I would argue this was the last time Apple’s user interfaces went in a bold direction.
What is obvious in this frenzied sea of Artificial Intelligence is that Apple did a quick course correction and tried to “fast follow” before the mistakes of others could be identified well enough to refine and/or correct the way Apple has historically been successful in the past. In the case of Siri, the fact that Apple has let it languish for so long more than hints that it just doesn’t see enough value in the voice assistant proposition.
Were those bad moves? Who can really say at present. It is true that Apple had to react. OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT upset a lot of apple carts and not just those in Cupertino. But Apple’s quick course correction, coupled with a less than enthusiastic response in the same year of its other attempt at a computer interaction paradigm shift–spatial computing with the Vision Pro–has cut down the chances for any short term smooth sailing.
Some are positioning this moment Apple has created for itself as a necessary gamble Apple had to make. Here’s an excerpt from Jason Snell at Six Colors:
And if you asked those same Apple executives if they were aware that the cost of underdelivering those features in the spring of 2025 would be getting beaten up in the press a little bit for delaying features, perhaps even back to iOS 19? I’m pretty sure they’d say that a little bit of negative press today, when the world isn’t really paying that close attention to Apple and AI, would totally be worth it.
That may indeed be true in and of itself. I have no way of knowing. What I do know is that this gamble might have had better odds if Siri, prior to all of this, hadn’t been such a historical and neglected mess for far too long.
Security and Privacy
This delay announcement has also opened wider the door for criticism that might shatter another of Apple’s tent pole marketing strengths: security and privacy. Here’s a post from Simon Willison, who has a hunch that the delay might be related to those issues. It’s also worth taking a look at Willison’s earlier post on prompt injection. John Gruber of Daring Fireball takes Willison’s point further in this post. Here’s the key excerpt:
Prompt injection seems to be a problem that LLM providers can mitigate, but cannot completely solve. They can tighten the lid, but they can’t completely seal it. But with your private information, the lid needs to be provably sealed — an airtight seal, not a “well, don’t turn it upside down or shake it” seal. So a pessimistic way to look at this personalized Siri imbroglio is that Apple cannot afford to get this wrong, but the nature of LLMs’ susceptibility to prompt injection might mean it’s impossible to ever get right. And if it is possible, it will require groundbreaking achievements. It’s not enough for Apple to “catch up”. They have to solve a vexing problem — as yet unsolved by OpenAI, Google, or any other leading AI lab — to deliver what they’ve already promised.
‘Ay there’s the rub,” as Hamlet would say. No one has those solutions, yet it’s full speed ahead as the selling and hype continues. There may be a dream in there somewhere, but as for now, whether sleeping, sleepwalking, or blindly chasing bounties, all the consumer is left with at the moment is “stay tuned.”
For better or worse, we are not going to return to our regularly scheduled programming.
(I note that I was putting the final touches on this piece Bloomberg is reporting that Apple plans the biggest user interface design overhaul in quite some time with this year’s new operating system releases that will be unveiled at WWDC. Apple is under pressure from not only this Apple Intelligence, but other issues that concern developers as well. Shiny distractions generally win when it comes to taking the heat off of failures and problems.)
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
Lots to think about in this helter-skelter moment we’re living through.
Back at it after a couple of weeks of traveling and dealing with a case of pneumonia. (All is well.) Certainly there’s a lot going on and most of it is happening in a such a rush that I’m not sure anyone has enough space to accurately write or think about all that’s happening. But there is some good stuff to recommend.
Leading off this week are some articles from folks who are concerned, distressed, pissed off, and searching for tech solutions that don’t rely on America’s big tech oligarchies.
If you’re one of those searching for different tech solutions, remember no matter how long a service may have been around or how big the company behind it is, it’s all impermanent. As an example, Om Malik takes a look at Microsoft ending the run of Skype this week in Skype Is Dead. What Happened? It might take awhile, but everything eventually dies.
There’s lots of rethinking of lots of things these days. David Todd McCarty is Rethinking Pride.
Adam Serwer asks the question most are asking when it comes to the words behind the ugly acronym, MAGA: Just when was America great, exactly, and for whom? Check out The Great Resegregation.
And to close things out, NatashaMH takes a look at simple acts of kindness in Of Munchkins and Manners. Do be kind.
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
Bogus science, finance, politics, and tech dominate this Groundhog Day edition of Sunday Morning Reading.
Here we go again. If it feels like Groundhog Day that’s because it is. Happens every year, but the things going on in this country feel very similar to, yet even more dangerous, than they did eight years ago. It’s a movie we don’t want to revisit, but are living through. Live through it we must. Enjoy today’s Sunday Morning Reading while we try to avoid repeating the same mistakes, or at least dodging them.
With trade wars now needlessly underway most of the big news ahead this week will be in the financial markets. John Lanchester has an excellent piece with excellent context about finance and what he calls “its grotesquely outsize role in the way we live now” in For Every Winner A Loser.
Meanwhile as the world focuses on trade wars, Elon Musk and who knows who else is rampaging through the federal government in ways that sound more than illegal. Josh Marshall asks Who Can Stop Elon’s ‘Team’ Wilding Its Way Through The Federal Government?
I don’t often link to Wall Street Journal pieces in this column unless they are about tech related topics. This one by The Editorial Board is worth a read and definitely worth the headline: The Dumbest Trade War In History. Seems like Murdoch and his scribes got what they wished for. Again.
On the tech front, running parallel to our political misfortunes is a river of thought on Artificial Intelligence, most of it negative these days, but also thoughtful. Alex Kirshner interviews Ed Zitron and came away with One Of Big Tech’s Angriest Critics Explains The Problem. Audrey Watters tackles the issue and says “In this AI future, there is no accountability. There is no privacy. There is no public education. There is no democracy. AI is the antithesis of all of this.” I fear she’s correct. Check out AI Foreclosure for her piece, but also the excellent collection of links on the subject she provides.
Whether it’s the science of tech or the science of finance, there’s science. We ignore it at our peril. But what happens if some of the science is bogus? Frederick Joelving, Cyril Labbé, and Guillaume Cabanac tell us that Bogus Research Is Undermining Good Science, Slowing Lifesaving Research.
In this day and age going viral is the equivalent of getting that infamous 15 minutes of fame. Both are fleeting. Joan Westenberg says Trust Me. You Don’t Want To Go Viral.
NatashaMH writes about a woman finding meaning in memoirs in Drowning In Sobriety.
And, as we enter Black History Month in the U.S., check out Deborah W. Parker’s piece on Belle da Costa Greene in The Black Librarian Who Rewrote The Rules Of Power, Gender and Passing As White.
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. You can also find me on social networks under my own name.
There are no good options when it comes to choosing your tech these days.
Let me rephrase that slightly, if you’re hesitant or resistant to AI taking over your tech there are no good options these days. Whether it be mobile devices, laptops, or desktop rigs, the makers of the major operating systems have all jumped on the Artificial Intelligence band wagon and are doing really poor Harold Hill impersonations trying to sell us on it.
Sure there are different flavors, but they’ve become or are becoming intrusively the default. We all know where this appears to be heading. Computing devices without AI will be the flip phones of tomorrow, If they are even available.
Apple has turned on Apple Intelligence by default, (even though it is still in beta).
Microsoft is forcing Copilot into Office 365 and its operating system and charging you more for it, wanted or not. (There are ways to ditch it.)
Google is doing the same thing with Android. Even if you don’t use an Android device, but use Google services, Google’s AI now accompanies anything you do with those services. Of course other smartphone users that rely on Android are following along, but there’s really no choice.
If Artificial Intelligence was a virus, we’ve all been infected and there’s no vaccine to argue over, nor will wearing a mask help, because it extends beyond our own computing lives to the interactions we have with our doctors, banks, any form of customer service, and other affiliations of our daily lives. Yes, there are still refuges where you can attempt to avoid AI, but that’s not the real world of daily commerce and daily personal interaction.
Now, it sounds like I’m 100% in the anti-AI camp. I’m not. I think there are legitimate uses. Some are even quite good. Some offer promise. I actually experiment with some of that. But I also think that there’s too much that isn’t useful, too much that just doesn’t work as advertised (beta or not), and too much that’s more than potentially harmful, especially in greedy hands.
I can get excited about the technology, especially on some of the exciting hardware we now see. I just consider it a shame that all of that computing power is going to be put to the uses it appears we’re in for.
We’ve been here before with new technology. First it’s a curious trickle then it becomes a tidal wave that sweeps us along in its path. It’s tough to live daily life without a smartphone these days. That’s a more recent fact than many want to acknowledge.
There’s another factor. Part of the hesitancy and resistance I know I’m feeling is that I don’t feel like I can trust the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, much less the social networks and other applications that run on their hardware. I’ve always been skeptical, but that trust level took a knock with the recent knee-bending by these companies, trading cash for favors from the evil regime now in place in the U.S. I’m not sure how much more capitulation will be required, but I’m betting the folks trying stay in the game will find themselves laying prostrate before this is all over.
I’ve used Apple products and have been a fan for quite some time. I imagine I will continue to be a user of those products going forward, given the investment I have in that ecosystem. But I also use Microsoft and Google products and support a coterie of folks who do as well. I also use services on my Apple devices by both Google and Microsoft.
In order to support the folks I do, I keep up to speed with this increasing and haphazard pace we’re all forced into. The questions I deal with lately focus on how to remove or prevent these AI features more than they do about how to guide them through new features. When every day users are asking those questions there’s obviously a problem. As for me, tasting the poison in order to understand the which antidote is needed feels unhealthy, a bit dangerous, and just plain dirty.
So, I’m starting to check out other hardware to become even more familiar, but also to look at my own options. Again, there’s no easy choice. I picked up a Pixel Pro 9 recently and am checking that out. Does that mean I’m thinking of changing horses in this stream we’re in? Probably not. As I said, there are no good choices. It really is a pick your poison era we’re in. I’m not happy about it. I’ve always been tech curious, it’s just sad my current curiosity is bred from such distaste, distrust, and disgust.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
Good reading and good writing is just a heartbeat away in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading
What do Aristotle, Katherine Hepburn, Garth Hudson, beautiful minds, and ugly hearts have in common? They all make an appearance in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. Or at least writers doing their thing and writing about them do.
Hearts can be ugly things, yet they draw our poets, songwriters, and story tellers like moths to a flame. NatashaMH flutters around the heat in The Beautiful Mind Of An Ugly Heart.
Speaking of ugly hearts, quite a few of them are on appearing on shirt sleeves alongside all the chest thumping and Nazi salutes going on here in the U.S (and elsewhere). We’re only a week into the victory laps and lapses of humility, yet already writers are wearing out keyboards with words of resistance. Ian Dunt has penned How To Resist The Tech Overlords. In this new and hot category of writing, let’s hope none of this seems like fiction down the road.
Another way to resist the tech overlords is to just say no when they overreach. Microsoft overstepped by raising everyone’s Office 365 subscription prices on the inclusion, wanted or not, of its Microsoft 366 Copilot AI features. There’s a way to avoid the price hike written up by Mark Hachman on PC World. You might want to check that out.
For a good read on the entire Microsoft situation, Ed Bott chronicles the story of Microsoft’s latest AI unintelligent move in The Microsoft 365 Copilot Launch Was A Total Disaster.
Meanwhile the Chinese might have found a way to fight the AI money grab and spend long before we reach the cash out stage. Zeyi Yang lays it out in How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made A Model That Rivals OpenAI. The sexy stories about TikTok might be taking a back seat to this one.
Alex Himelfarb tells us The Politics of “Common Sense” Is Making Us Meaner. He’s right.
Joan Westenberg takes it all on in Clash: Power, Greed, And The Fight For a Fair Future.
If you’re concerned about what the tech side of all of these moments of madness we’re living through might mean, remember it’s not the tech and it is. Check out Nina Metz’s review of the Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy flick Desk Set. As Ms. Metz puts it, This Movie With Katherine Hepburn And Spencer Tracy Anticipated Anxieties About The Internet And AI. Oh, also check out the flick. You won’t be sorry.
There really is nothing new under the sun, including cribbing and cropping from the work of others. Massimo Pugliucci takes a look at Ayn Rand’s Objectivist theories and her claims to be influenced by Aristotle. As he puts it well, “one can hardly imagine what possible points of contact the two might have.” Take a look at On Ayn Rand and Aristotle.
These are indeed challenging times and often they feel quite dark. Alexander Verbeek gives us the always needed reminder that When Darkness Returns, Art Exists.
And on that note, and since we lost one of the greatest musical artists of my generation, Garth Hudson, this week, Check out Amanda Petrusich’sRemembering Garth Hudson, The Man Who Transformed The Band. Remember many of Hudson’s and The Band’s creations came in another turbulent era in our history. A beautiful musician and beautiful mind.
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. You can also find me on social networks under my own name.
History has its layers and facts might be damned, but that’s what myths are made of.
Tick. Tock. Or is that TikTok? Regardless, it’s the last Sunday Morning Reading column before things take a drastic turn here in the United States. Plenty to be concerned about, but Sunday Morning Reading will sill keep chugging along until they turn out the lights. That said, quite a bit of today’s chugging focuses on that messy intersection of tech and politics, because, well, you know, that muddled mess of things is what attracts my attention. They are no small things.
Speaking of small things, David Todd McCarty suggests that when we get too overwhelmed perhaps it’s time to get small. Check out Let’s Get Small.
There’s A Reason Why It Feels Like The Internet Has Gone Bad is actually a short interview with Cory Doctorow by Allison Morrow about a term Doctorow coined that I think fits much (and not just on the Internet) of what we’re already living through and what we’re in for: enshittification.
George Dillard wonders why modern business tycoons are like their forbears in Nerds, Curdled.
John Gruber highlights and expands on an article by Kyle Wiggins at TechCrunch that hit amidst the growing chaos this week when Google announced that’s its ever declining search product would now require JavaScript in order to use Google Search. Check out Google Search, More Machine Now Than Man, Begins Requiring JavaScript.
We love stories, but we love our myths more. Neil Steinberg takes on The Myths of Telephone History. The lies we agree upon might just be the most pungent of them all.
To close things out, NatashaMH reminds us in Chestnut Roasting On An Open Fire that some say that “the strength of a superhero is determined by the strength of his villain—the greater the adversary, the mightier the hero.” We’re about to find out if that’s true or not.
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. You can also find me on social networks under my own name.
Joe Reddy for the Associated Press writes up a nice piece about Amazon’s AI on its Prime Video broadcasts of NFL Football games. While Reddy’s piece covers the what is, (that’s his job) it doesn’t talk about the what for.
Here’s the thing, the prevailing wisdom in sports coverage these days seems to be that the games themselves must not be enough to hold fans attentions long enough for them to watch the commercials, so we need to add distraction upon distraction before, during, and after the games to keep the fans interested. Certainly one can say that this season’s slate of NFL games wasn’t that terrific, at least the ones I watched. (I watched more than Chicago Bears games, because the Chicago Bears don’t play real football.)
Sports used to be a pastime. Watching a game was a luxury on TV or in person. And that was before the tremendous cost of attending a game in person went nuts. In many places, you could always catch the local games on TV, but that’s an age coming to an end sooner than we’d all like.
Certainly, these AI generated statistics do deliver an interesting factoid now and again. So this is not to say there’s not any value. It’s just not redeeming enough in my opinion.
Amazon isn’t alone, All of the networks are fumbling over each other to have the latest, greatest whiz bang graphics fill up our screens. They’re not mining data, they are mining dollars. The insertions of stat upon stat, mid-game interviews with coaches and players all come at a cost.
In my humble opinion it’s a cost that cheapens not enhances. But that’s the way we’re headed, because eventually we can tack even more sponsors and ad dollars on to each stat and distraction.I’m sure betting on what the AI will predict will soon follow.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
How many folks do you know who don’t trust iCloud? Or “The Cloud” in general? Quite a few, I would bet. When Apple rolled out iCloud in 2011, it offered, as all things do, a promise. Trying to move on from the problems associated with its previous troubled cloud service, MobileMe, it was a rebrand, a re-architecting, and a repeat of prior problems that missed the target and generated enough criticism to turn iCloud into a punch line for all jokes about “The Cloud.”
Apple has steadily improved iCloud (it still has issues), but not enough to remove that tarnish. The recent flap over summaries generated by Apple Intelligence threatens to do the same to that new brand, and quite frankly to the concept of Artificial Intelligence in general. Some might see that as a good thing, but that’s another issue for another day.
The issues with Apple Intelligence are compounding, largely due to mistakes of Apple’s own making in its rush to correct its way-too-late entry into a game it is losing. Overhyping the beta release as if it were a finished product certainly didn’t help. That investment in dollars essentially removed the excuse that mistakes can happen in betas. The “New Siri” remains delayed. And, like every AI release I’ve seen from other makers, once the initial shine wears off, the rough edges begin to show and cracks are revealed. I can’t count the number of users who claimed they’ve turned off most of Apple Intelligence features.
This latest flap deals with Apple Intelligence summaries. There have been legions of screenshots posted of humorous and not-so-humorous, inaccurate, confusing, and downright misleading summaries. The BBC has now twice called out Apple for misleading and inaccurate summaries. The most recent one named a darts player the winner of a competition before the match had even been played.
Apple has now responded, reminding everyone about the beta status and that a future update will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarized by Apple Intelligence. In essence, a warning label.
Quite a few big dogs in the Apple influencer game have already barked, weighing in with possible suggestions and warnings. (See these links from John Gruber and Jason Snell.) There’s somewhat of a debate as to who should have ultimate control over whether or not users see summaries. Should developers be able to opt out of having notifications summarized from their apps, or should users have control by opting out of the feature? Either way, in my opinion, it points to essentially a defeat and also a larger problem.
First impressions matter. Screwing the pooch in a first impression typically leaves a mark.
Given what we already knew about AI hallucinations, mistakes, and problems before Apple belatedly and hurriedly entered the game, I don’t think anyone thought Apple would have solved that problem. Thus, the shield of announcing it as a beta. But the dollars spent on promoting it certainly didn’t offer enough prominent caveats to cut through the glitzy messaging. Apple Intelligence, beta or not, was the tentpole marketing feature. Heck, Apple’s announcements moved markets as if gold had been discovered.
Summaries are just one of many features that AI offers, Apple’s version and others. Arguments can be made that summaries are a good thing in a busy world, and also that they are completely unnecessary given that there is a level of mistrust that already existed pre-Apple Intelligence, that requires, almost demands, users to check the work generated by the AI before relying on it.
However Apple chooses to work its way out of this latest problem of its own making, its misplaced marketing miscues have called enough attention to Artificial Intelligence to make it a problem for that entire segment of the tech industry. What was a key selling feature is quickly becoming the butt of another joke.
If this was a game of darts, Apple’s shot would have not only missed the target but also missed the board.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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