This Week in AI: The Apple Intelligence Waiting Game
When Apple announced its newest smartphones, the iPhone 16 line, it said the devices were built "from the ground up" for the company's Apple Intelligence service. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait a little longer to see what that means.
The tech giant launched its latest iPhones this week without the company's much-hyped AI technologies. Instead, Apple launched the devices with the old-fashioned Siri voice assistant, relying instead on other upgrades to wow us, including a new touch-capacitive camera control button, bigger batteries, new colors and some screen upgrades.
Many of the reviewers who got to use the devices early insisted on reviewing what's in the box, rather than Apple's promised future upgrades. And with that in mind, they seemed to agree this year's upgrades were perfectly fine.
"They lack Apple Intelligence at launch but make up for it in other ways," my former-coworker-but-always-colleague Patrick Holland wrote at CNET.
Nilay Patel at The Verge was obsessed with the camera, calling its new button a "small" change that made a "big difference."
YouTuber Marquess Brownlee meanwhile asked why the camera control button didn't have Touch ID, like the iPad Air's power button. (Yeah, Apple, why not?)
Maybe that's for next year.
LinkedIn's AI is reading your resume
Tech giants seem to be desperately searching for new data to feed their AIs from wherever they can.
The latest is Microsoft's professional social network LinkedIn, which told 404 Media that it is scraping publicly available profile data by default, unless users opt-out.
To opt out, go to Settings on LinkedIn, click “Data Privacy,” then click “Data for Generative AI Improvement," and toggle the feature off.
404 Media noted that LinkedIn had not updated its terms of service before it began scraping.
Snap likes your face, a lot
While LinkedIn is looking for data in its resume piles, Snap is finding it in face filters. The social network that says it's actually a camera company said that unless users opt out of a new setting, it may start using their actual face in personalized ads.
404 Media wrote about how the feature had been enabled by default and "approved" by users when they agree to use a feature called My Selfie, which creates AI-generated images of a user based on photos they share with the app. Of course, the feature's terms of service include allowing the company to use “you (or your likeness)” in ads," although there's no indication this has started to happen yet.
Meta pauses plan for public AI scraping
The drama over data scraping didn’t end with LinkedIn and Snap. Meta agreed to halt plans to train its AI systems on publicly available user data from the European and UK after regulators from Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) and the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) raised concerns.
“The DPC welcomes the decision by Meta to pause its plans to train its large language model using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram across the EU/EEA,” Ireland's DPC said in a statement.
The move marked the latest in a series of moves between tech giants and European regulators, who increasingly appear to believe AI data scraping violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The law requires, among other things, that companies explicitly seek and receive approval when collecting and using data from users.
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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.
