AI is making smartphones verifiably worse by design
The article discusses the negative impact of AI features in smartphones, arguing that they often complicate user experience rather than enhance it. It categorizes AI features into 'good,' 'bad,' and 'ugly,' suggesting that many are unnecessary or poorly designed. The author emphasizes the distinction between memory and data in AI, highlighting the ethical concerns surrounding data usage.
- ▪Smartphone manufacturers are overloading devices with AI features that may not be beneficial.
- ▪The author categorizes AI features into 'good,' 'bad,' and 'ugly,' with many deemed unnecessary.
- ▪A distinction is made between memory and data in AI, raising ethical concerns about data harvesting.
AppleInsider files mainly under tech. We currently carry 194 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | AppleInsider |
| Canonical URL | https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/05/18/ai-is-making-smartphones-verifiably-worse-by-design?utm_source=rss |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 11:52:18 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T11:54:56.453Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T11:54:56.453Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | G26SMLGYxsU1 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Editorial AI is making smartphones verifiably worse by design Amber Neely 0 e-mail BlueSky Mastodon X Facebook Reddit Mon May 18 2026, 07:52 AM EDT · 12 minute read Is Apple Intelligence something the iPhone even needs? Smartphone manufacturers are overloading their devices with AI features in an effort to control how you interface with both the device and information at large. That's not good. On Friday, Wes had asked me if I wanted to write a piece on what I thought AI was good for, versus what it is decidedly not good for. Yes, he knows exactly what he was doing with that "harmless pitch." He is, after all, someone who routinely tags me in Slack with some sort of very, very stupid AI innovation just to get my reaction. And who can blame him: I take the bait every time.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at AppleInsider.