Is AI a bad word in your house? NBC News did the asking. Turns out it is. Only 26 percent of people look at artificial intelligence and smile. The rest? They side-eye it. So maybe you weren’t shocked. Apple’s WWDC keynote lasted two hours. For the first twenty-eight minutes nobody said the letters A-I. Not once. After the silence broke presenters pivoted hard. They used their own branded term instead. Apple Intelligence. Always the branded term.
Why? The concept is radioactive. You bring a hot mic into a packed hall. You don’t mention the third rail. Apple knew this. They prepped the script to dodge the negativity. “Artificial intelligence” carries baggage. It sounds like The Terminator waiting to wipe us out. Or it sounds like job loss for that high school senior graduating next week who still can’t find an intern spot.
Renaming things doesn’t erase reality though. KFC didn’t stop frying chicken just because they dropped Kentucky. The Poltergeist family moved the graves but the bodies stayed buried under the yard. Change the label. The tech is still there. Dig it up if you want. It’s just called something else now.
I suppose I’m just a Gen X fossil at this point. Let the kids play. One feature stuck with me though. Spatial Reframing. Dad takes a picture of kids on their last school day. Angle is bad. He uses Apple Intelligence to crop the photo and generate new background pixels. Smooth it out. Fix it. The internet loves it.
Does the photo actually look better?
Marginal gains. That’s it. Is that enough to justify hallucinating content over a real moment?
I have photos of my dad from World War II. Okinawa. Hawaii. Black and white snapshots taken by a Marine who didn’t care about composition. They are crooked. Dark. Unprofessional by every metric. AI could fix them. Apple Intelligence could make them crisp. Slick. Gallery quality.
I keep them exactly as they are. The bad angles stay. The grain stays. Every pixel is genuine. The devil-may-care smile? Real. The bottle of beer? Real. It’s messy. It’s true. And I prefer it that way.
“When I hold these photos… I know every bit of them is real.”
