During the World Wide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple’s long-awaited entry into artificial intelligence took shape. While a recent OpenAI conference showing off new tech evoked comparisons to the title character in the 2013 film Her, Apple Intelligence brought to mind someone else: Gary from Veep.
For the uninitiated, Gary (Tony Hale) is a body man for Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in the world of the HBO hit. The veep may have a gold-plated gift of gab and can work a room with seasoned slickness, but she’d be in deep trouble without Gary. His job is to anticipate her every need, keeping chapstick and aspirin handy, sure, but more importantly, supplying her with sotto voce reminders about everyone who may not be important enough for the vice president to remember. As he reminds her in ">a memorable scene, “I’m your calendar, I’m your Google, I’m your Wilson the Volleyball.”
If the WWDC presentation is to be believed, iPhones are about to get a lot more Gary-like. According to one demo, when iPhone users get a text about an upcoming meeting, Apple Intelligence will soon allow them to ask Siri, in natural language, whether it will make them late for their daughter’s recital, spurring Siri to cross-reference all pertinent emails, texts, calendar invites, and even city traffic patterns—synthesizing all that data into a succinct response. Classic Gary move.
In the remainder of the presentation, the Apple team illustrated with just about every kind of example how easily important details can slip through the cracks of our overtaxed memories these days, and how easy the company’s new AI tech makes sifting through digital detritus to find it.
Where are those concert tickets?
Where did you jot down which friend’s book recommendations?
Where is that photo you took of your partner trying on a cowboy hat at the Levi’s store?
The answer to each: Just ask Gary. (I mean Siri!) Powered by Apple Intelligence, the app can now instantly scan a backlog brimming with users’ data to surface the forgotten personal details of their lives. Abracadabra?
Apple Intelligence includes a partnership with OpenAI to use ChatGPT for a portion of its AI offerings. So far, though, OpenAI seems a lot closer to realizing the somewhat-creepy promise of an AI-powered future. When the company debuted its GPT-4o last month, it demonstrated voice and even tonal recognition straight out of Spike Jonze’s Her. (Maybe a little too straight out of Her; that film’s star Scarlett Johansson threatened legal action, causing the company to remove the voice featured in the demo.)
The way that GPT-4o seamlessly interacts with visual and audio input, and does so in a way that is more conversational than any AI that’s come before it, makes the keyboard-free interface of all devices in the future of Her feel like an inevitability. A not-too-distant one at that.
The way that Apple Intelligence remembers exactly which recipe you briefly considered making last week in a text thread before getting too distracted to follow through? That seems more like the work of a personal assistant who knows way too much and is a little too eager for a pay raise.
Don’t get me wrong: Some of Apple Intelligence’s features seem incredibly useful, alleviating pain points of tedium and skill deficit. It lets users airbrush intrusive objects out of the background of their photos in a matter of clicks. Take a photo of your deck and ask Siri what plants would go well with it, and it will use AI to source tips. Mostly, however, what Apple seems to bring to the AI table is applying the kind of functionality we’ve seen with ChatGPT to the massive amounts of personal data in our iPhones.
As CEO Tim Cook describes it, Apple grounds its AI in the personal context of users’ routines, relationships, and communications. The way this innovation mainly seems like it will manifest in Siri is that it now has access to every detail and idea that ever fell out of your head and landed somewhere in your phone.
There’s a thin line between useful and indispensable, though. The ability to access forgotten info without having to actually look for it seems nice but comes with some strings attached. This newfangled Siri may be helping us with memory loss in the age of information overload, but it may also inspire further memory loss and possibly laziness.
We used to have to memorize a bunch of phone numbers before cellphones; now plenty of people don’t even know their spouse’s number.
We used to know our close friends’ birthdays by heart, but then a little birthday-reminder app called Facebook permanently changed the equation.
We currently have an incentive to at least try and remember those slippery details dancing on the tips of our tongues before giving up on them, or to scroll through our camera roll and find that cowboy hat photo. Having a digital Gary in our ears will make us rely on him instead, which is the first step to becoming as hopeless without him as Selina Meyer would be.
At least she’s a high-placed politician with a lot of fundraising at stake. What’s our excuse?
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