Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram block use of Apple Intelligence

dws-2 said:
There's a lot I dislike about meta and facebook, but I fully support removing AI writing. I don't want to read generic AI writing. I want to read things in my friends' own words.

A couple of comments about this.

First and foremost, not everyone in your Facebook feed is your friend. There are tons of advertisers, news agencies, whatever else is being promoted by Meta. Writing tools (AI or not) help all of these people.

Second, your friends could easily use other writing tools (again AI or not) provided by Meta, Apple or another third party to alter their writing. We already have built-in spell checking and rudimentary grammar correction on mobile, computers, etc. for a long time. What you are reading isn't just raw output from your friends or anyone else.

Should your friends use AI-assisted writing tools? It's really their choice. Again, if they are really motivated, they can use someone else's AI writing assistant to generate their Facebook comments and just cut-and-paste.

However, AI writing tools don't make anyone smart. It just reduces some of the gruntwork and makes people with extremely poor writing skills *sound* like they know how to write. But if you talk to them, they'll still use the same words they always use, have the same analytical abilities, etc.

What AI-assisted writing tools really gives to the user is free time. What you do with that extra time is what might possibly change your life. If you use that extra time to learn more about something that requires critical thinking, yes, AI offers a path to increased knowledge. If you choose to use that extra time watching Tik Toks, well, maybe you're going to end up dumber than before. Or maybe you use that extra time to exercise, work in your garden, bake cookies, play with your kids, etc.

If some of those activities are what your friends are doing with their newly available extra time, well, maybe it's not such a bad thing. But in the end, it will be their choice since AI-assisted writing tools aren't going away. They are here to stay whether they be offered by Meta, Apple, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, whoever.

Anyhow Meta wants you to use their AI tools because they can sell your activity to the highest bidder. That's their business model. They really don't want you to spend your time elsewhere using someone else's AI tools and just cutting-and-pasting the final result. Moreover they can use your interactions with their AI to train their models. Using ChatGPT or Apple Intelligence doesn't make Meta Llama any better.

This should be obvious but clearly it is not to some people on the Internet.