Apple is reportedly ready to announce AI — in the most Apple way possible

When he takes the stage for his keynote at Apple's 2024 Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC) Monday, Tim Cook will find himself at the crossroads of a Choose Your Own Adventure.

Will he bend to the whims of a market that worries Apple isn't doing enough "AI stuff," and breathlessly hype up any aspect of machine learning or large-language-modeling in iOS 18 that could be described as Apple Intelligence (the "that's so Apple" name that will reportedly be used Monday)?

Or will he stay the course he has set in recent keynotes, where Cook has never so much as whispered "AI," and focus on delighting customers rather than investors? In other words, will the meaning of Apple Intelligence be ... deploying AI features intelligently, securely, and minimally?

Certainly, there's an enormous amount of short-term financial pressure on Cook to take the first path. Apple stock is up year on year, but nowhere near as high as tech stocks linked to the AI craze. Nvidia just overtook Apple as the second most valuable company in the world because it's keeping pace with the massive amounts of processing power required by ChatGPT.

If it were up to Wall Street, Cook would turn WWDC into Google I/O — which for two years running has been an AI buzzword fest, a desperate bid to incorporate AI into every aspect of every product whether they belong there or not. (Looking at you, Google AI search overview that tell us to put glue on pizza.)

Listen to Apple's two most recent earnings calls and you'll hear Cook trying to talk about AI like he's at a parent-teacher meeting and AI's parents just walked in. "We view AI as huge," he said last month. "The potential is certainly very interesting." Still, he added, "there's a number of issues that need to be sorted ... I do think it's very important to be deliberate and thoughtful about these things."

You can almost see the report card: Tends towards hallucination. Room for improvement.

Likewise, Cook's prior earnings call in February contained a bullish quote for the headline writers: "We continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort [on generative AI], and we’re excited to share details of our ongoing work in that space later this year," Cook teased. But drill down and you'll find a rich seam of disdain.

"In terms of generative AI, which, I'd guess, is your focus, we have a lot of work going on internally as I've alluded to before," he wearily told the third analyst who asked about it. "Our MO, if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves."

Translation: Sure, you'll get a new Siri. Maybe some novelty AI writing services for Messages, an app where Apple likes to bring the fun (see also: confetti, fireworks, Memoji stickers). Maybe even the on-device translation service that was the most impressive thing about Samsung's Galaxy AI launch.

But there's no need to spray the letters "AI" indiscriminately on everything — especially not if it's going to make the kind of people who buy iPhones that much more wary of the product.

What do Apple customers want with AI?

Outside the Silicon Valley bubble, less has changed than you might think. "The typical [iPhone] consumer is not going to care [about generative AI]," veteran analyst Gene Munster told Yahoo. "They want to know screen size, No. 1. Second is camera, third is battery."

Plus, top of mind for many customers is the word that Apple has been using in its iPhone ads (like the one above) for more than three years: privacy. Apple's business does not depend on vacuuming up your data and selling it in bulk like Google does. Rather, it depends on you buying a more pricey device because it won't track your every move, and it'll gatekeep the hell out of the App Store to make sure developers don't either.

What does privacy have to do with AI? They're like oil and water. Look at Microsoft, so enamored with its AI visions that it is literally going to take screenshots of everything you do in Windows; that's already being investigated. Look at Adobe, changing its terms of service so that Photoshop can peek over your shoulder, using your work to train AI and stoking user outrage in the process.

The creative class, Apple's (and Adobe's) core audience, is pissed at AI. They're wary of having their work stolen, furious at what conventional wisdom says OpenAI did to Scarlett Johannson. Heck, they're pissed at Apple for an ad that doesn't even mention AI, where a bunch of creative tools were crushed into a single iPad. That was deemed tone-deaf in an era where AI is copying and crushing artists.

Regular consumers aren't happy when they hear the dreaded letters either, even if Wall Street thinks they should be. A Global Consumer study conducted by Qualtrics XM Institute last year found that the iPhone's largest English-speaking markets — the U.S., the UK, Canada, Australia — were also the most likely to say AI will have a negative impact on society. In the U.S. alone, some 40% of consumers already say they don't trust AI results — a number that may only go up with every slice of glue pizza.

So yes, Tim Cook has a Choose Your Own Adventure decision to make on Monday. But as with many options in those books, given the circumstances, it's really no choice at all.