iOS 18.3 Enables Apple Intelligence By Default
For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.
This switch from opt-in to opt-out has provoked some conversation. People don’t like the idea of AI being foisted upon them. Personally, I think it sounds far worse than it is, when you actually think about the implications of the change. In fact, I’d say it’s almost entirely benign.
Apple Intelligence gets a lot of flak, but Apple Intelligence is not monolithic, even though Apple marketing tries to present it as a unified suite. The only thing that really links these features together is they are all backed by some kind of generative model. If you ignore that technical implementation detail, the individual features that comprise Apple Intelligence are disparate and separable.
If Apple Intelligence is never turned on, Apple customers would miss out on several useful — and uncontroversial — enhancements. That includes vastly improved photo search, Clean Up, and Writing Tools. Likewise, the Siri improvements are only contentious in the sense that they didn’t go far enough in making the assistant smarter, not because the changes are actively bad or harmful.
I think you can say the same about Image Playgrounds and Genmoji; perhaps some people find their output distasteful, but having Apple Intelligence ‘on’ does not force Apple-generated images upon you. It’s still essentially an opt-in feature because you, the user, has to go and actively do something to make the phone generate an image for you.
That leaves the AI summarisation feature, which is basically the only thing Apple Intelligence does right now on your behalf, proactively. You don’t request a summary, the summary is presented to you.
Quite reasonably, the zeitgeist is that notification summaries are problematic. They are frequently inaccurate, and incorrect summaries of news alerts have riled respected publications like the BBC and The New York Times. Indeed, Apple risks more backlash now that iOS 18.3 turns Apple Intelligence on when you update, as that means in turn more people will be seeing these summaries. Apple has “temporarily” disabled the feature for news apps, but notification summaries of other types of app notifications are also readily wrong or misleading. Its summaries of messages conversations are mediocre at best. The sense is customers aren’t getting value out of them, and now they are being forced upon them.
To be more sensitive about the public mood, I think they probably should have kept notification summaries as an opt-in feature, even if Apple Intelligence in general is turned on by default now. That’s the only real critique of this I can field.
Other summaries provided by Apple Intelligence also behave proactively in that they are generated without an explicit user action, but they are far less fraught with controversy. Summaries in Mail, Safari Reader, and recorded phone call transcripts are pretty good for accuracy, and I think people find genuine value in them.