It's all about Josh!

Open the “apps” section in your settings (it’s usually at the very bottom), go to photos and scroll until you see “Enhanced Visual Search” and then turn that shit off. Then go to “Privacy and Security”, scroll until you see “Analytics & Improvements”, and turn off “Improve Siri & Dictation” as well.

​I am an artist with hundreds upon hundreds of my artworks in my photo album. I also have plenty of photos with not only my own face, but the faces of my friends and my family. I do not appreciate that being used to train AI without my consent, and I’m pretty sure it’s the same for others too.

I’m so tired of big companies.

The "Enhanced Visual Search" feature, as I understand it, is primarily for location-tagging photos of you based on landmarks in the background. It does not use your photos to train generative AI, but it does use AI analytics to match objects in your photo to a database of global locations to identify where the photo was taken, even if you have location-sharing and your phone's GPS turned off. So you probably DO want to turn it off to protect your privacy.

The "Improve Siri & Dictation" feature is also not exactly new, but I believe it was rolled out later than the feature above. When turned on, it allows apple to record anything you say to Siri, and uses AI analysis (at one time in combination with some humans for quality control, though maybe not anymore thanks to the tendency toward over reliance on AI these days) to process those recordings to improve your device's ability to understand you. Though they claim it's used exclusively for that purpose, recordings taken with this feature are still subject to data leaks like all other data your phone gathers, so it's up to you whether the convenience of an optimized dictation or AI assistant feature is worth the potential privacy risk.

On the topic of Siri, you should also probably go into your "Siri" settings, scroll down to "Apps" and click each one to turn off "Learn From This App" for any app you don't want to risk a privacy breach from—particularly banking, medical, credit, and password-keeping apps. You will have to do this for every individual app, including new apps when you download them because it is turned on by default. This feature allows Apple's proprietary AI, Siri, to transfer information between apps, analyze your usage (when and for what you use an app), and compile the data purportedly for categorization and app suggestion. But like the features above, it also carries risk.

You may have noticed that all of these features use AI, but it's important to note that they use AI Analytics, and NOT Generative AI. These are two very different things that frankly should not be lumped into the same category. AI Analytics is using computers to do what computers to best: process and categorize data. Generative AI is attempting to make computers do what only humans can do: create something new. The former saves countless man hours in tedious labor and reduced the error rate of that work. The latter is polluting fresh water and increasing energy costs to put human creatives out of work.

And that's not to say that AI analytics doesn't have its own drawbacks, the privacy concerns being the one this post is focused on. Since it allows massive amounts of data to be processed very quickly, it emboldens companies like Apple to collect as much data as possible without regard for the user's privacy.

When it comes to AI analytics features like the ones in this post, whether or not you disable them (because they're all enabled by default), depends on how you value your privacy, what you want to protect, and what you're willing to give away for the sake of greater convenience.

I've had all of these, as well as the entire Siri function, turned off for years (and they're still off, I checked, they're not being suddenly re-enabled without notice) bc I value my privacy more that any of these features. I want my phone to be a communication device and pocket search engine ONLY. Plus a few games that can be played without any service (fun fact if you put your phone on airplane mode it prevents ads from loading, but many mobile games are still fully functional).

However, if you travel a lot, or have a poor memory, maybe it would be worth it to you to have your phone be able to identify where a selfie was taken. If you're dyslexic, low vision, or have difficulty typing, then it may not seem like a big deal to sometimes be recorded if it means the dictation function is as accurate and effective as possible.

It's very good and valuable to know what your phone does and what it's taking from you, which is why I took the time to write out this run-down, but there's no need for fearmongering about AI and especially GenAI in features that don't use it (and I'm not saying this to harp on OP, they made an honest mistake and updated their post when they learned, but the original is still circulating--it could happen to anyone).

a lot of people are giving examples in the notes of things they just find annoying like not using headphones in public, but OP is talking about actual literal scripts of things to say in awkward situations

if you have a date or two with someone and you don't see a relationship developing? most millennials / gen Zers just end up ghosting. but a social script that might have been taught and rehearsed in the past could be:

"I really appreciated getting dinner with you the other night and I enjoyed your company, but I'm afraid I didn't feel a spark. I wish you the best, and hope you find that special someone!"

Remember things about your friends! Ask people about their weekends, hobbies, holidays, studies, and jobs! Listen for the concerns people have and what they are working on! Draw connections between one person and another to get the ball rolling. "Oh, Maura, you just got your first cat! You should talk to Felix, he used to work at a rescue. Felix, please tell Maura all the new-cat-guardian pointers."

"Bill, Sheila, Xan, this is my friend Kale. Kale is really into Star Trek, Bill you and them should talk about it!"

If you're looking for a manual on these sorts of things; social etiquette, social scripts, how to handle difficult and/or awkward social situations, etc. then I highly recommend picking up any book by Miss Manners. Her books really are the gold standard for learning the types of skills this post is talking about. I should also mention that Miss Manners is witty and hilarious so her books are also fun to read.

The best book by Miss Manners to get started with would be Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. This one is probably the best starting point because it gives the best overview of all the basics.

Sorry @darlingdear but I couldn't let this stay in the tags.

I say this as someone who is neurodivergent had grew up very socially awkward, but recently I find the "screw small talk, I wanna get to know the REAL you" attitude to be pretentious as well as a demonstration of a lack of boundaries.

But also, I think a lot of people who have this attitude don't actually really know what does qualify as small talk. The definition of small talk is any topic that's of no real consequence and includes topics like food, pets, sports, music, whatever show you're currently streaming, whatever book you're currently reading, and yes, the weather. A lot of people who have this "I hate small talk / I don't do small talk" attitude probably think it's only reciting a bunch of secret scripts about the weather, and don't realize how much they engage in small talk whenever they talk about their pets or their favorite foods or the really cool show they're watching right now.

Small talk is a way of sounding out a person’s attitudes. It’s about finding out if they’re a rabid asshole or someone you want to spend more time with.

I had a professor who got angry at a group of (mostly women), from five countries, all of whom met yesterday, for talking about daytime TV. He basically insulted us and called us shallow.

how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)

I don't have any experience with the weirder corners of university campuses – my work in that particular job just never happened to take me there. I did, however, once have to do a cable trace in the basement of a former Christian elementary school. It had haphazardly been subdivided into numerous tiny rooms, some as little as ten feet across, with no central hallways or apparent floor plan. Every single room was, for reasons that were and remain unclear to me, full of broken kitchen appliances. One room in particular contained an enormous industrial freezer unit that was larger in its smallest dimension than any of the doors leading to it. Was it delivered in pieces and assembled on site? Did they build the room around it? That one still bothers me a little bit.