Has AI’s Critical Flaw Been Forever Removed?
For a free masterclass in patience, marketing, newsjacking, and playing the rebel, look no further than Apple’s WWDC 2024, where the company announced, among several other products and features, its own version of artificial intelligence (AI).
While the actual AI technology appears to be the same tokenized technology we have come to know, love, hate, obsess over, and ban outright in countless organizations, it is nevertheless the tech behemoth’s attempt at making a widely adopted technology their own, as they often do.
Take, for example, Apple’s virtual reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro. Never once will you hear them call it virtual reality. The company, to its credit, does this with virtually every product, and I would argue is quite successful at it. By “it,” I mean creating a subcategory among categories.
In fact you can go all the way back to the release of the original iPod in 2001, where Apple took the simple, but game-changing mp3 player that most of us were still in love with, having gladly hurled our Sony Discmans with the never-perfected CD anti-skipping technology into the nearest landfill. Apple took the .mp3 player, elevated and perfected it, wrapped it in a beautiful design, and made it their own. This is a common theme in Apple’s playbook.
Perhaps then, it comes as no surprise that the company yet again relabeled artificial intelligence, a technology that hundreds of millions of people have been actively using in their lives (whether they want to or not).
Apple’s Free Masterclass, Courtesy of WWDC 2024
Apple essentially did three things here, all of them written deep within the company’s marketing and disruption playbook:
1. Waited.
Apple is a company that, from the outside looking in, appears very comfortable with waiting. I myself have used some brand of Android phone since the Android mobile operating system effectively sprang onto the market to become the ubiquitous major player that, some would argue, can go toe-to-toe with Apple’s walled garden.
So over the years, as I have been both a student of and a heavy user of mobile technology, I have seen firsthand the relative gap in time that progresses between when Android operating systems get a feature and when Apple, I would argue, perfects that same feature, works it deep into their ecosystem, applies exquisite design as they always do, and announces the feature at one of their annual Apple events, pitching it as if it a new technology no one has ever seen.
And I guess they are kind of right. Technically, no one has seen Apple’s take on this technology, so in a sense, it is indeed brand new.
By applying their own developmental and creative rigor to a feature that millions of people around the world have latched on to, integrating that seamlessly with the rest of their product line, and renaming it so it is an Apple-specific flavor of what is sometimes basic technology, the company increases Apple users’ love for the products while also (nearly) enticing the early adopters among us to make the leap from our own mishmash of operating systems into the ecosystem that is Apple.
2. Newsjacked.
Newsjacking is a term used in the public relations and communications industry to describe when a company takes advantage of or leverages a recent news story to highlight their own story. In other words, they try to hijack the news by inserting their own narrative into a trending topic. This tactic can help draw attention to the company by associating its message with a popular or widely discussed event or issue. For better or worse, it can be successful, though the rate of success varies widely.
A news peg, on the other hand, is generally understood to be a more subtle version of newsjacking. It involves using a news story as a reference point or “peg” to ground another story. This can help the reader or audience understand where the new story fits into the broader context of what they have already been reading and seeing in the news. While newsjacking seeks to capitalize on a trending topic, a news peg uses current events to provide context and relevance to a different story.
Now, to call Apple’s announcement of their own version of AI at WWDC 2024 newsjacking is a bit misleading. And I am open, as always, to feedback on how best to categorize what the company did here..
Let me put it into context…
Artificial intelligence, the original acronymized AI, has been in our collective vocabularies for years, and only recently, less than 2 years ago in fact, when ChatGPT sprang onto the scene, did the term “AI” fill our days, nights, evenings, and weekends.
As with any paradigm-shifting technology, there are questions as to AI’s true usefulness and value in creating a better society.
Is AI, and specifically generative AI, here to help us? Is it going to make our global society more equitable, give the underserved more access to critical services, and accelerate our rate of learning new things?
Or will it be another technological leap forward that global governments allow to proliferate unrestrained? Will these same governments only step in and start to apply regulatory scrutiny when the number of people left behind by this new technology reaches a critical mass? By then, this untested medium will have simultaneously resulted in significant technological progress and severe human suffering, leaving us all to wonder whether adopting it was in our best interest after all.
I, for one, do not know the answer to those questions, and if anyone else tells you they know the answer, they’re trying to sell you something.
But I digress…
My point here is that AI is a bit of an anomaly in the news cycle. Any journalist or news outlet could cover AI in any forum or any medium, and on virtually any topic, and no one would bat an eye.
Perhaps it is the fear around this new technology and what it will mean for our society that is driving the never-ending onslaught of “AI everything.”
Or, as I am not a pessimist, perhaps it is the rate of technological change AI is ushering in that keeps everyone tuning in for more stories about how this technology promises to change our lives for the better.
Regardless of which it is, and I readily admit it may be something completely different that keeps AI front and center in everyone’s mind and above-the-fold on countless news sites, AI and news about it have a stickiness to them. The pervasive nature of AI delivers a staying power that a company (like Apple in this case) or a journalist, or your brother-in-law at the weekend barbecue, can use as a news peg or perhaps even newsjack the entire term to tell their own story and apply their own view on it.
3. Redefined a Weakness by Removing It Completely
Enter: Apple Intelligence, the acronymized version of which is, not-so-mysteriously, AI.
Apple has used AI technology as their base technology from which to build Apple Intelligence. And of course, they are integrating that into virtually everything they do, seeking to perfect the design, driving it deeper into their entire ecosystem, and (to the collective sigh of relief or shouts of joy, depending on how much you use Siri), improving the company’s default voice assistant.
What Apple has done here is, as I’ve already mentioned, well within their playbook. But one thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that something Apple often does, and I would argue, does better than anyone else, is to identify a technology that has a loyal-if-not-fanatic user base and uncovers the technology’s critical weakness. Apple then takes that weakness, and simply removes it from the equation completely.
The Achilles heel that has hobbled early adopters? Apple has perfected it so seamlessly that the same technology we have been using (tap-to-pay, anyone?) seems Luddite in nature as compared to Apple’s take on the same tech (we see you, Apple Pay).
Artificial intelligence has always had a weakness, and its weakness is not its capability, or the amount of money it takes to train the models. Its weakness is in the name — artificial.
Very few among us would gladly declare that they prefer artificial anything, from artificial sweeteners to artificial relationships. Come to think of it, maybe those two are synonymous terms.
And yet again, I digress…
Artificial intelligence, for all its capability and power does indeed have a critical flaw, an Achilles heel. It’s artificial.
And Apple? They saw this weakness, maybe before any of the rest of us did, and with their announcement of Apple Intelligence, they are seeking to remove that weakness from the equation.
And in news stories, weekend barbecues, and executive boardrooms for the foreseeable future, the human in all of us will hear the acronym “AI,” and hope against hope that the journalist we are reading from, or the person we are having the conversation with, or the board director sharing how this technology has changed the industry, is actually talking about the real thing.
Which AI is the real one? That, my friends, is for you to decide.
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.
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