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When did I agree to this? AI invades iPhone

Minoosh

Penultimate Amazing
Joined
Jul 15, 2011
Messages
12,594
It started when I accidentally hit "add a caption" to a picture on my phone. It produced my image, only with my dachshund's body outlined and identified as a dachshund.

So photo recognition software is going into my photos and identifying things, great. (I wonder how it would react to human nudity but don't want to experiment.)

Then later a "pet friends" video appeared at the top of some random thing my phone does, which is to highlight one of my photos on a certain screen. A dashboard thingy. Only this wasn't anything I'd produced. It had reached into my phone and found a lot of video from when my dog was a puppy and getting socialized to other dogs on the retirement campus where I lived with my mom. This was in spring 2020 and the place went into hard lockdown for months with one respite being the dog park where we could socially distance while our dogs played.

It was a pretty decent video, it knew how to capture the outlines of dogs in play, zero in on their faces, splice together the most active shots and splice together at a very high rate. It did not include any people.

Why is this happening? I have a feeling this is an iPhone term and/or condition I MUST have OK'd - otherwise WTF? Or, WTH? Is it an iCloud thing? Is this artificial intelligence? I know dog videos seem like a trivial application, but it was essentially using the techniques of propaganda.

It also occurs to me this could and maybe already is producing "sports highlights" reels instantaneously.

Maybe this isn't artificial intelligence. That must mean more than photo recognition and good algorithms for producing happy dog highlight reels. Its ability to recognize a dog by breed impressed me, but then, a dachshund is not much of a test.
 
Are you saying the “pet friends” video outlined and cut out images of animals and showed them on new backgrounds?

My iPhone doesn’t do that.

I like how Apple Photos has photo recognition and you can search for various categories, it’s really handy, and I like the memory compilations it serves up.

But I wouldn't mind if there was a way of getting it to ignore certain times in the past.
 
Could you tell us which apps you were in? Photos? iMovie? Or maybe a 3rd party app?

Photos (on iOS 17, at least) has a "For You" section where it generates "Memories" from your photos. iMovie has a "Magic Movie" creator in the "Start New Project" section, as well as a set of storyboard templates.
 
You mean you don't carefully read the entire "Terms and Conditions" every time you update your iPhone software? There's a South Park episode about this.

I've noticed this too, fwiw. The Photos app has some fancy new features. Often I discover these features accidentally, just through browsing through my photos to send them to friends/family.
 
Are you saying the “pet friends” video outlined and cut out images of animals and showed them on new backgrounds?

My iPhone doesn’t do that.
No, it's the original background. The software just captured video highlights and put them on one clip.

I like how Apple Photos has photo recognition and you can search for various categories, it’s really handy, and I like the memory compilations it serves up.

But I wouldn't mind if there was a way of getting it to ignore certain times in the past.
Yes.

I don't have a lot of personal images on my phone and haven't seen other compilations from my phone. I didn't ASK for it, someone some algorithm is using/editing my material and I can't figure out if I ever gave consent.
 
Last edited:
Found this.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy... to protect,them for research and development.

Photos is designed to protect your privacy while delivering a personalized experience that reflects your unique photo library. Apple does not access your photos or videos, and does not use them for research and development.

Photos uses on-device machine learning to deliver a personalized experience, organize photos and videos in ways that are meaningful to you, and power features like Sharing Suggestions, Memories, the People Album, and Featured Photos. This on-device analysis includes scene classification, people and pets identification, photo quality analysis, and audio classification. Photos also uses on-device information, such as which photos you have edited or shared to other people, people you frequently communicate with in Messages, relationships set in Contacts, Home and Work locations set in Contacts or Maps, locations where you take photos, and important dates in Calendar and Contacts.

Photos additionally uses on-device analysis to recognize the faces of people in photos, and groups them together in the People album. When you add a name to a person in the People album, their name and face will appear in Photos across all your iCloud-enabled devices.

iCloud Photos

If you use iCloud Photos, your photos and videos are stored securely in iCloud and kept up to date across your iCloud-enabled devices. iCloud protects each photo and video file, along with the file’s metadata, by encrypting it in transit and at rest.
 
I don't have a lot of personal images on my phone and haven't seen other compilations from my phone. I didn't ASK for it, someone some algorithm is using/editing my material and I can't figure out if I ever gave consent.

You effectively consented when you purchased an iPhone with the Photos app pre-installed, but it sounds to me like your privacy is basically protected, or at least this app is not showing your photos to other people or otherwise using them for research and development purposes.

If you really want, you could delete the app itself, although it would be inconvenient if you want to view them later.

When the software is updated from time to time, new features may be added.
 
I was just looking at my own iPhone and I noticed that if you go to the Settings icon and go into it you can scroll down until you see the settings for the Photos app, and if you go in there you can change the settings to probably disable this sort of thing. Then it would go back to just being the plain vanilla Photos app like it used to be. That doesn't create "memories" unbidden from your photos.
 
It's all coming together:- AI-generated 'memories', autonomous driving, Neuralink, robot workers.

Apple recently cancelled the iCar, and the people working on it have been reassigned to Apple's generative AI team. Skeptics are calling Project Titan an expensive failure, but they don't understand that Apple has gotten what they wanted out of it and doesn't need the car anymore. You see, they now have everything they need to create the next big thing, the iPerson!

But what does this mean for iPhone users? All I can say is, read the Terms and Conditions very carefully before hitting agree!
 
It's all coming together:- AI-generated 'memories', autonomous driving, Neuralink, robot workers.

Apple recently cancelled the iCar, and the people working on it have been reassigned to Apple's generative AI team. Skeptics are calling Project Titan an expensive failure, but they don't understand that Apple has gotten what they wanted out of it and doesn't need the car anymore. You see, they now have everything they need to create the next big thing, the iPerson!

But what does this mean for iPhone users? All I can say is, read the Terms and Conditions very carefully before hitting agree!

It's only a matter of time until we see the iDad. Pre-loaded with lots of bad jokes.
 
I personally would not be happy with something like a Photo app on my phone that autonomously rifles through my photos and makes cute little compilation videos of them, when that's not something I ever asked it to do. Nor that if I happen to attach a name to one photo that it will then go through and attach that name to every photo with that person in it that it can find, whether I want it to or not.
 
I find I have to go through my complete Facebook settings once in a while, and there are a lot of them, because updates change, add, or reset things on the sly. Digging down through all those menus takes several minutes, at the least.
 
I personally would not be happy with something like a Photo app on my phone that autonomously rifles through my photos and makes cute little compilation videos of them, when that's not something I ever asked it to do. Nor that if I happen to attach a name to one photo that it will then go through and attach that name to every photo with that person in it that it can find, whether I want it to or not.

I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint in so much as I don't want apps doing things with my data that I didn't actually agree to. As a general principle I think this makes sense, and in this particular case I'd prefer if the app, when this new feature was first added, asked me if I wanted to activate it or not.

But I'm curious if there's something specific about this case that you worry about. It goes through your photos and attaches a name to photos with a particular face... is there something about this particular act that you worry about?
 
I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint in so much as I don't want apps doing things with my data that I didn't actually agree to. As a general principle I think this makes sense, and in this particular case I'd prefer if the app, when this new feature was first added, asked me if I wanted to activate it or not.

But I'm curious if there's something specific about this case that you worry about. It goes through your photos and attaches a name to photos with a particular face... is there something about this particular act that you worry about?

Other than it being involuntary and presumptuous? Not really; it's the principle of thing. But isn't that enough reason to object?
 
Is this really any different to the Mail app 'rifling through' your emails to provide search results when you need them?
 
I personally would not be happy with something like a Photo app on my phone that autonomously rifles through my photos and makes cute little compilation videos of them, when that's not something I ever asked it to do. Nor that if I happen to attach a name to one photo that it will then go through and attach that name to every photo with that person in it that it can find, whether I want it to or not.

Apple OSs do ask you if you want to use such features.
 
Is this really any different to the Mail app 'rifling through' your emails to provide search results when you need them?

No.

And for most people these types of features are a godsend which is why they are so popular with most people. Literally last week I was helping a friend setup Google photos to do the face recognition. He's just received a few hundred photos from his old town cricket club as he has volunteered to get them into order, they go back about a hundred years and upto the 1990s when it disbanded. As you can imagine being able to find all the photos with Fred Smith in them by labeling a couple with his name is proving a fantastic tool for him.

I like how I can search for photos of my nephew and it will grab them from when he was just a toddler and upto the latest ones when he is is almost 30 without having to go through literally thousands of photos to manually label them with his name.

It's not great with pets, it can't distinguish between my current dog and my last dog, both black labradoodles, must be racist....
 
Is this really any different to the Mail app 'rifling through' your emails to provide search results when you need them?

No; also equally problematic.

Apple OSs do ask you if you want to use such features.

I would surmise not explicitly enough, as it was possible for the OP to have agreed to use them without realizing it.
 
I like how I can search for photos of my nephew and it will grab them from when he was just a toddler and upto the latest ones when he is is almost 30 without having to go through literally thousands of photos to manually label them with his name.

Yeah, I think that's pretty cool. It can two photos are of the same person even if one was taken when they were a child and the other was taken when they were all grown up. I can do this with my own kids, but if it were a stranger I'm not so sure.
 
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