New iPhone integrates AI: Expert explains what that really means for users

Apple unveiled the iPhone 16 on Monday, a device designed around Apple Intelligence, the company’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) offering. This new feature promises a highly personalized experience that goes beyond AI, but what does that mean for avid iPhone users? As AI continues to appear in our everyday lives, what do consumers need to be aware of?

Walid Saad, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and artificial intelligence expert at Virginia Tech, says AI today is equivalent to the Internet in the 1990s, early 2000s: “Its adoption will be inevitable, and we should be well-informed in order to understand how it will change our world in the next few years.”

AI is a term that appears in different contexts — and in many instances, incorrectly. The first step to being well-informed is understanding what AI is.

“Artificial intelligence is a scientific field primarily concerned with designing machines that can learn, reason, and perform functions in a way analogous to humans,” Saad said.

“Practically, AI relies on a set of algorithms based primarily on machine learning that enable devices to perform computationally intensive functions or tasks that include predictions and forecasting, data analytics, and natural language processing, among others. In the real world, AI-powered functions can permeate everywhere from home assistants to autonomous robots,” Saad said.

For iPhone users, Apple Intelligence promises a more personal experience, but what exactly does that look like?

“AI will enable a broad range of features on the iPhone ranging from improving Siri and its conversational abilities to improving search functions and enhancing the tool set that can be used for writing purposes,” Saad said. This includes analyzing photos or documents and composing emails and other messages.

Users also will have new ways to compose and create photos, images, and other creative content.

“Indeed, we can see that a big common theme among those features is personalization, making the day-to-day features aware of their users’ preferences, actions, and needs to provide user-centered assistance and experience,” Saad said.

AI algorithms work by being trained on data sets, so they would need access to them, which can raise privacy concerns. Saad says Apple did implement some guardrails by designing “on-device AI algorithms that can use the data locally available on the devices, without communicating or sending data to the cloud.” 

“This naturally alleviates some of the privacy concerns, but we would still need to see ‘behind the hood’ to better understand what kind of information is still being accessed or used through the several features,” Saad said.

“Moreover, it is conceivable that third-party applications that use AI may not have similar guardrails and thus, looking at privacy-preserving solutions for AI remains an important area of research,” Saad said.

AI is quickly becoming an invaluable tool for people across multiple industries — AI is helping doctors perform more effective and faster diagnostics and ChatGPT can be an impressive writing aid — but Saad said it is natural for people to be apprehensive of new technology.

“I advise those who have not embraced the technology to investigate its potential uses and how it works. Then they can make informed, piecemeal decisions on what AI tools they wish to use. Some may be comfortable using AI as a writing aid, but perhaps not as part of a feature in their car,” Saad said.

“Eventually, AI features will proliferate in various shapes and forms across different devices, and we should be ready to understand their uses,” Saad said.

About Saad
Walid Saad is a professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to research surrounding wireless communications including 5G and 6G, artificial intelligence, game theory, machine learning, and cybersecurity. Saad is the Next G Wireless lead at the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus. Read more here. 

Interview
To schedule interviews with this expert, contact Margaret Ashburn in the media relations office at mkashburn@vt.edu or 540-529-0814.