WWDC: Two of AI’s largest PR points play to Apple’s strengths

Apple is ready to unveil a bunch of AI-centric updates in iOS 18 and its different software program platforms this Monday at WWDC.

A lot of what the corporate will announce is taking part in catch-up to its opponents, although at a scale and accessibility that’s exhausting to match. Nevertheless, the place the corporate is very poised to make an AI splash is in its differentiated method.

Not like its opponents, Apple has strengths in two areas which can be at present PR complications for AI: privateness and the atmosphere.

Right here’s what which means for its AI reveals at WWDC.

Making AI’s downside areas into Apple’s benefit

Anticipate Apple to tout a singular method to AI at WWDC. Even when the corporate is essentially simply taking part in catch-up with its AI options, it can differentiate itself by emphasizing that two of its main values haven’t been compromised within the course of. Relatively, they’re core to all the pieces it’s doing.

Apple’s AI implementation will contain operating the vast majority of AI processing totally on-device. In different phrases, your iPhone 15 Professional will carry out these AI features without having to ship your knowledge elsewhere.

This implies two key issues:

1. Your knowledge is extra personal and safe than if it was despatched to the cloud
2. The environmental affect of those AI options can be minimal

Apple can take this method with AI as a result of its chips are extraordinarily highly effective, and likewise deeply built-in with the software program they run.

This two-fold differentiation of Apple’s AI method leverages the corporate’s current strengths and mitigates AI’s weaknesses.

Apple’s strengths: privateness and the atmosphere

Anybody who has adopted Apple for lengthy will know that the corporate likes to tout its privateness and environmental values excess of any opponents.

On the privateness entrance, Apple has for years made privateness a spotlight of its advertising and marketing. Almost yearly there’s a brand new iPhone advert that emphasizes this privateness angle.

It’s not simply advertising and marketing. The corporate has lengthy constructed its {hardware} and software program in such a manner that prioritizes maintaining consumer knowledge secure and safe. Apple’s major enterprise is promoting iPhones, not advertisements, so it naturally has fewer incentives to promote your knowledge than an organization like Google.

Equally, Apple has made environmental affect a core consideration in its enterprise practices. It’s working aggressively to carry company-wide carbon emissions to internet zero by 2030.

Each time a brand new product is introduced, Apple makes a degree to spotlight its environmental affect. Final 12 months’s Apple Watch, for instance, is the primary Apple product to go totally carbon impartial.

Apple’s strengths are an ideal match for a few of AI’s chief PR points.

AI’s weaknesses: privateness and the atmosphere

Simply this week, Microsoft’s spectacular AI-powered Recall characteristic in Home windows was uncovered as a safety catastrophe. With most firms doing AI work in the present day, transparency and readability round how their AI options will safeguard consumer privateness are sorely missing.

AI additionally has a status difficulty in relation to the atmosphere. Right here’s Alokya Kanungo, writing for Earth.org:

As datasets and fashions change into extra advanced, the power wanted to coach and run AI fashions turns into monumental. This enhance in power use straight impacts greenhouse gasoline emissions, aggravating local weather change. In keeping with OpenAI researchers, since 2012, the quantity of computing energy required to coach cutting-edge AI fashions has doubled each 3.4 months. By 2040, it’s anticipated that the emissions from the Info and Communications Expertise (ICT) trade as an entire will attain 14% of the worldwide emissions

Up till in the present day, each AI’s privateness and environmental points have typically been seen as obligatory evils in society. Unlucky, however well worth the trade-offs this new know-how offers.

Anticipate Apple to spotlight repeatedly the way it doesn’t should be this manner. Its AI method can be completely different.

Will Apple’s AI change the world?

Is Apple going to announce AI options Monday which can be revolutionary, game-changing, issues that nobody has seen earlier than? Possibly, however in all probability not. AI is arguably a recent precedence for the corporate, in any case.

Nevertheless, with all the pieces it does announce, I count on to listen to privateness and environmental narratives repeated advert nauseam. These are areas primed for Apple to “suppose completely different,” and I hope they set a brand new normal for the AI trade to observe.