In the first image, the sender says they went camping in the mountains, but then sends a photo of the seaside. Did they really go camping at all?
In the soapbox derby image, the sender claims they "just finished the latest renderings" for the sushi car design, yet the design is clearly AI generated! They've been lying to the team about how they're creating the designs.
Rich Dinh, who's dominating the chat with his ravioli dish? It's a stock photo by Helen Rushbrook! Is he making anything himself?
How many people in Dimension Apple are secretly struggling like these three? There must be huge pressure to conform.
if the sender is the one tweaking the prompts for the AI to render, then why would they not be correct in saying they are finished with it. you sound like one of those that think any use of AI imagery is wrong.
…including, me. On that list.
I think part of what’s disquieting is that there is a “formal text English” that exists (and people know about), but people use it only in certain circumstances, like when you’re texting a group of people that you don’t know very well, and that you don’t want to offend, or that you want to seem “proper” for.
It’s temping to think that what we observe on these lists is how those people are, but every now and then someone on my list will post a message intended for someone else…and it no longer fits “formal text English”.
I suspect this language’s use is highly contextual. To me, part of the the oddness of it all is that I would almost never use formal text English in the contexts shown in these marketing images.
Now I think about it, that's probably an autistic trait. I kind of have to carefully construct what I'm saying in any context, and it looks like this.
> Does the Dimension Apple exist?
> For a long time I have enjoyed the stilted, improbable cheeriness of fake Apple texts for their extreme distance from my own texting habits and experiences. (As my friend Emma put it to our group chat “if any of you texted me like this I would immediately call your significant others to make sure you hadn’t been kidnapped.”) But in the last year or so I have realized that Dimension Apple does exist--or at least overlaps with our own--in one very specific place: The WhatsApp groups that the parents at my son’s daycare/school create to share information or set up play dates. In these groups, and only in these groups, do I encounter the same kind of earnest helpfulness and baffling ebullience that exists in the Dimension Apple. Naturally, I find them totally alienating.
It's the overly formalized way everyone seems to interact regarding anything, the formulation of every little remark showing signs of a communication environment where the participants take care to conform to certain social norms and expectations, like normal people _would_ in spaces with such unspoken constraints (like the list of their block for example) -- but they seem to do that with close friends and family!
... As a deranged older man, I now collect artifacts from Apple advertisements, to reconstruct the characters and interactions portrayed in their fantasy world, to inform the public about how (for instance) they text differently from real people. In my defense, it's no worse than collecting Princess Di memorabilia, or being crazy into Pokemon or Harry Potter.
The world of Apple propaganda is expansive and rich, and has more than enough depth to justify a worthwhile hobby.
In fact, at a party or gathering I'd be way more excited to hear about your collection than to hear about a guys collection of stamps or WWI era guns (not to disparage those hobbies, they just don't interest me personally much)
[0] https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ug105jVWociHnn_oPJoa8gPj...
Can you explain this work in more detail? Are you basically reconstructing the contents of a screenshot in vector graphics so it can be translated/edited/scaled up but still look correct?
Mmm. that. looks. delicious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-jK37C4CxA
Not sure if it's a Bay Area thing, an Apple thing, or what, but I don't think it's a "fantasy"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/apple-wont-let-f...
Once you see it, it's really hard to unsee and can make certain shows like Law and Order SVU seem like a longform Apple ad. Ted Lasso on Apple TV (and presumably other Apple TV shows too, though I haven't really watched others) is very bad about the amount of Apple product placement and comes close (but doesn't quite) ruin the show.
So from the authors comments, I take it I am a rare minority in that all my texts are in full, grammatically correct sentences, with proper punctuation?
The picture shows the opposite: you tried to type “chillax” but it is correcting it to “chill”, but offering you to revert the correction.
:)
There's nothing wrong with either, though, and I wouldn't recommend judging anyone's mastery of style or grammar based on only a single (and quite idiosyncratic) communication channel.
This bit was hilarious. It's comfort food in the same vein as the Barbie movie - everyone is polished and no one needs to work.
And yet I obviously have so much to learn.
When tasked with creating a fake conversation for my own telecommunications app BenkoPhone whose primary point of difference is the ability to send and receive picture messages, I created a conversation that goes like this[0]:
[Contact Name: My Colleague]
Inbound message: [PHOTO OF KITTEN] Check out this cute kitten!
Outbound reply: That’s adorable now GET BACK TO WORK!!
Now I’m rethinking my whole strategy.
BenkoPhone users can send each other messages and pictures (and other files) directly, just like WhatsApp or Signal or whatever, but when they send to a mobile number that is not hosted by BenkoPhone it will go out over the mobile network, a bit like how when you send a picture to an Android user from iMessage it goes as an MMS but if you send to another iMessage user it goes via Apple's internal messaging.
I don't believe they did.
apple employees: blink twice if you’re okay
However, also creepy. Not sure if its the way humans have always written, that ChatAI got too good too fast, or that they all secretly had them all for years (Multiple massive AI releases in a year???, "had em all in a box in the back")
The 2nd image (with pair of images) on the Sharing Photos subsection [1] literally looks like StableDiffusion++. Somebody wrote two prompts, that had something like "Male with frizzy hair next to girl in pink shirt with glasses with brick building behind" and then it didn't care whether it was the same male in both, or what skin color.
Most text also seems weirdly similar to: Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra [2]
[1] https://maxread.substack.com/i/137044198/sharing-photographs...
It's a shame they didn't do this, especially for Johnny Appleseed. Or maybe they tried and got shot down.
Apple had a page for an iOS release one year explaining new calendar features. On the page I saw a calendar event for name of a guy I personally knew who worked at Apple! It was a dentist appointment at 2:30.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicollection...
> apparent politeness of the language is inversely proportional to the potential violence of the culture
=> apparent politeness of language directly proportional to the peacefulness of the culture
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-displays-weird-message...
“Hey Mom, I figured out what all that noise coming from the basement is.”
It never occurred to me until now, but there's actually a somewhat-coherent "sharing philosophy" woven through many of Apple's products. It seems like Apple envisions a world where social networks and "broadcast"-sharing of content don't exist. In this world, when people want to "tell people" an update about their life, they share that update on a whitelist basis — first meticulously considering exactly the people they want to receive the update, and then pushing the shared item directly into those people's faces as a realtime push-notification-generating event, as if with the intent of starting a synchronous conversation. They may then later rope a few more people into the conversation, as they become relevant — but only on a strictly need-to-know basis. Doing this pings them as well, showing them the whole conversation so far — and they're expected to read back and keep up.
In other words, in "Dimension Apple", nobody has a parasocial desire for people they don't know to see their posts. People only share things with people they know; and even then, only certain friends get to see certain things. And those friends don't mind at all that you had a long conversation that you excluded them from, until you didn't.
Even more intriguingly, in "Dimension Apple", people seemingly only find out news about you because you've shared that news directly with them. No "following" someone; no copying messages from one conversation to another; no gossip, even.
I would say that real people don't work like this... but now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure that this is exactly how people in the upper class — people for whom "discretion" is core to their lifestyle — would prefer all their "sharing" be done.
There is just an expectation in society today that you know everything that's going on in everyone's life. It's very, very strange to me. It's hard to explain why, but I get serious black mirror sort of vibes from it.
Also, the lack of gossip in "Dimension Apple" is a crucial distinction. You don't need a social network to spread news, if you know that everything you tell that one aunt is going to be repeated on every phone call she makes for the next two weeks. (And she makes a lot of phone calls.)
After I finish a trip (recently I went to Supai, AZ) I send little bundles of photos to different people via my phone very much like these screenshots.
There was a period earlier on where macOS and iOS had Facebook and Twitter posting built in where those got some airtime in promotions, but as the shine of social media wore off those integrations disappeared and their promotional material reverted to a world where sharing happened over the modern equivalent to iChat (iMessage) or maybe Mail.app.
Arguable — mass-mailing async updates (think: postcards) about your life has been ubiquitous for as long as people have been going off and doing interesting things. This evolved into mass-emails. I was BCC'ed a lot of "wedding photos.zip" and "in paris.jpg"s emails in the 1990s; much more often than such a thing was ever directed at me by a friend or relative, let alone directed at me synchronously in a messenger app.
Remember also: messengers back in the 90s and early 2000s didn't have a concept of "server-buffered message sends." For a message to transmit over AIM/ICQ/MSN/etc, both people had to be online at the same time. If you were travelling — and so potentially in a separate time zone — messengers really didn't work very well as a way to send large image files. Until very late in the lives of their protocols, most of them didn't even support sending files!
Or is this just part of Apple's (and many of its users') elitist and exclusivist mentality: they're better than everyone else, they don't need to interoperate with the rest of the world, and their sharing is reserved for the select.
(Not all Apple users are like that and probably not even the majority anymore, but it _is_ Apple's mentality, it was the dominant mentality among Mac users, and it's still common enough and OMG loudly pronounced enough by current Mac users.)
Given how many more people lurk in places like Twitter than post, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is more common than extensive social network use (a little social network use is unavoidable—if my wife didn’t have a read-mostly Facebook account, I’d have to)
Stapling vacation photos to every light post in the world is what seems like the bizarro-world behavior, to me. Which is what social network posting is.
Even the forum (custom Perl, then phpnuke, then phpbb) I ran for friends in high school & college was set to no-public-registration and no visibility to unauthenticated users. Like… duh.
Modern social media’s what’s fucking weird, not what we do.
Feels to me similar to the “companies ship their org chart” concept.
