Apple event incoming! But, as I write for Stuff, for me, Apple’s most important announcement next week won’t be a folding iPhone. 

Apple Intelligence isn’t great. I know: shocker. But I’ve spent a fair bit of time with it of late, for mag work. It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out in terms of people’s expectations. But experiments over the past month or so have just added to my scepticism about consumer-facing AI.

The revamped Clean Up feature in Photos varies wildly, regardless of the new ‘High Quality’ option. Reframing images is mostly abysmal beyond very slight changes. Automated shortcut creation is fine if the result works. It often doesn’t. The revamped Siri is an improvement insofar as it no longer mostly directs you to Safari or ChatGPT. But, as I expected, it’s no more accurate than a typical consumer-facing LLM. Which means when Shortcuts screws up, don’t expect Siri to help you fix things rather than giving you plausible sounding slop.

Obviously, I wasn’t personally expecting better. All this stuff is varying degrees of smoke and mirrors. But carefully stage-managed demos from tech giants set certain expectations for the average user – and I’m not sure they’re going to be met. 

Sony’s PlayStation is back. But this time you have to build it yourself out of 1,911 Lego pieces. Entertaining, also, that this new Lego kit echoes Sony’s current thinking in not giving you a disc. (It has little dioramas inside instead.)

Speaking of Sony, Game File reported on a recent court filing in which the gaming giant claims it’s already obvious digital games aren’t owned by consumers. The company argues “reasonable consumers would not be misled” into thinking they own the games they pay for, on the basis terms and conditions state software is “licensed to you, not sold”. 

According to Game File, Sony also bizarrely adds that people buying a digital game inherently understand they can’t own it because, if they did, no one else could have a copy. I guess all those digital games (and albums and books and comics) I’ve bought, downloaded and now own are just figments of my imagination.

Identity verification is broken, according to a Gizmodo report. The reason? 153 million driver’s licences are up for sale. Gizmodo’s not wrong. And so many people in tech said this is precisely what would happen when politicians screamed THINK OF THE CHILDREN when actually thinking of how age-gating might play with a certain portion of the voter pool. A pity they didn’t think more about what happens when everyone has to upload identity documents to access an increasingly wide range of websites.

MapQuest vs Trump is the, er, map-based story of the week. President Orange decided to ‘rename’ Lake Ontario, on the basis it would annoy Canada. The new name? Lake America, on the basis he has precisely no imagination. Most of the world sighed. But US tech giants dutifully got in line and updated their maps within the US to be Trump-friendly. Google was first. Apple then capitulated after a few days of goodwill towards the company. Microsoft did the same. MapQuest… didn’t. And, as The Guardian reports, it’s now gained a lot of new users.

Danny Boyle and AI, sitting in a tree. I didn’t see this one coming, but Boyle confirmed his new film uses GenAI. Deadline reported that Ink uses it to reanimate old images of the Kray brothers and Margaret Thatcher. Because, you know, there’s no other way that could possibly have been done without GenAI. Never before have we seen old images animated on the screen.

What’s even more bizarre about this is Boyle then saying that the “danger with the tech giants and their AI is that they will be able to replace journalism. They’ll be able to have an AI journalist who’s much more efficient, cheaper, etcetera, ecetera, and will that AI journalist speak truth to the power that created it?”

I mean, he’s not wrong. But there’s also a danger in, say, seasoned filmmakers deciding to use GenAI and therefore further normalising it, thereby putting people in the creative industries out of jobs. (See also: Eurogamer’s strangely casual dismissal of Crazy Taxi’s AI use.)

I just watched Coyote vs ACME. I had high hopes for the movie, not least after how Warner Bros. tried to kill it as a tax write-off. It’s a great shame that it hasn’t performed amazingly at the box office so far, because the film is a lot of fun and, as Mark Kermode said in his review, not only has a plot that properly fills its run-time, but real moments of emotional heft and pathos. Also, do check out the AMA with Wile E Coyote – and especially this wonderful interaction.