How to turn off Apple Intelligence on your iPhone

I think that's the least of the problems, if there's anything we're good at it's adding superlatives to product names. You can call it Hyperintelligence, Quantum Intelligence. Although you have a point with the snake-oil connotations, which is hilarious because it's only because of overpromising. The tech that LLMs are today is absolutely mindblowing and not something I could have predicted 5 years ago in the days of GPT2.

No need to worry, we’ve gone through this several times before

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

AI has survived as a name for a few decades now.

My prediction, based on no evidence or theory other than "the future will be like today, only in the future" is that AI will be called AI 300 years from now.

Do you feel better now?

Apple is exceptionally good at this, they have their own names for everything – from retina display to spatial computing, including calling AI “apple intelligence”. But this is popular outside of apple too, e.g. some years ago we decided to call servers “the cloud”.

That new AI tech might be branded as something else but I doubt it would be a problem.

“AI” is a vague non-term. In a way, it’s not unlike “DEI”. For some it denotes a useful idea and a mark of progress, for others it is a manifestation of doom, and in practical reality it is a trigger word to obtain investment, serve corporate optics and increase shareholder value. No one agrees on what “AI” means and most people do not have a good working definition, other than “hype alias for ML”.

ML is not a perfect term for marketing use, either. It is obscure, and to many people “learning” hints at some sort of human-like education process (though it is an industry term that does not imply anything of the sort).

I believe the most correct term to use in marketing and branding is… well, none. It is an implementation detail that presumably makes the product better at addressing certain problems or otherwise improve customer’s life. Talk about that instead.

The semantic debate over the label “AI” continues. While I think some of these concerns of AI for haphazardly inserted llms or other learning algorithms inserted into a product might have some merit i think ultimately it might fail to recognize the source of the problem isnt in bad use of labels but is fundamental to label usage itself. The ship of Theseus conundrum has some lessons applicable to this.

really its easy to point a label at tangible visual stuff, but pointing a label at more ephemeral stuff creates all manners of issues.

First i’d be willing to say this following statement is true: ‘humans invented object identities and invented the labels, and also both the label machine and the labels pointing at identities they want to label’, well i guess darwin invented the machinery but humans willfully made the first use out of the machinery for that purpose. if humans choose to make labels and define where labels are applicable, theres never going to be an objective true valid standard sense of a word, except by convention but even that rests on ‘objective’ quicksand, unfortunately.

beyond an argument on linguistics and the philosophy of language, that still leaves the substances of intelligence itself. while llms have clear huge gaps in inadequacies, i suspect its not far off from human capabilities by algorithm adjustments, adding architecture modularly (like reasoning), and ultimately through distillation and transfer learning, plus new techniques. Because of that, even dumb haphazardly shoehorned llms might surprisingly be closer to intelligence (or a core component thereof) than what even the most ardent semantic nazis would consider ( or archnemesis to LLms, PhD, Gary Marcus, orrrr also famous naysayer and contrarian, Yann Lecunn).

300 years on the exponential singularity timescale might actually be 5 to 10 years.

but maybe it might be akin to TV standards of black before TVs became capable of true black. grey was black until oleds and now previous tv formats of black, aka really grey, can now retroactively be reclassified as grey. or how about usage of the words unlimited when it comes to cellular data. those naughty marketers and their definition bending usage of words.

It’s mostly useful as a hands free shortcut to get replies from chatgpt. Beyond that it’s useless

All the promises of integrating deeply into the OS and have APIs directly into apps so you can use natural language to get any app to do stuff for you is vaporware

So much potential but none of it delivered yet, I hope it will change soon

Unfortunately it seems pretty half-baked and rushed out just so they can check the box without being as useful as it could be.

Here is the best commentary that I've read on the subject from someone who works regularly in generative AI: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/squandered-holy-grail/

You forget that Apple Maps was crap when it first came out, up to the point where people were questioning why Apple was bothering in the first place.

Early adopters should recognize first versions of forward-looking tech are going to be less-than-optimal, and that the warts will eventually fall off.

Y’all around here advocate for shipping whatever you have, but when a larger org applies your principles, everyone is in a tizzy.

It’s currently not all that useful, but also never gets in my way when I don’t need it, so I don’t really see the point in disabling it.

Yeah but, cynically, in todays age people put questions in a search or LLM instead of reading docs/manuals let alone reading what’s in their screen… so this article will be useful for them till they can out-SEO’d by Link farms.

Let alone reading what’s on their screen when they enable features, promptly forgetting they enabled it, thus asking how to disable them…

Ok enough. Have a good day :)

So many opt ins are deceptively worded (e.g. "would you like this personalized just for you?") or deceptively bundled, 'if you want feature Y, you need to enable X', I could see people opting in without fully knowing what they're doing.

I would be surprised if more than 99% of iPhone users go through all of the settings.

You and I might be knowledgeable enough to realize that we can turn such options off, but the vast, vast, vast majority of people are not.