The secret AI prompts at the heart of Apple Intelligence

AI advocates appear to look at large-language models, recall 3D printers exist, remember their favourite episodes of Star Trek and come to a swift conclusion. Soon, anything will be possible by you uttering a few choice words at a gadget. “Tea, Earl Grey, hot!” (Actual cup of tea appears from your Samsung Anything™.) “Build an app to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams!” (LLM crafts personalised Candy Crush. And somehow warps reality, because there’d logically be billions of the things.) We’re not there yet. But even Apple is now fully Team AI, if we believe ‘secret’ AI prompts at the heart of Apple Intelligence.

These were unearthed by someone on Reddit, who’s presumably now the proud owner of a pair of Apple Concrete Boots. But before their untimely demise, they discovered the latest macOS beta had a bunch of backend prompts that help Apple’s AI do your bidding. One for Mail was quite optimistic, let’s say. It first states the AI is “an assistant which helps the user respond to their mails”. It then adds: “Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information.” Because as anyone who’s used an LLM knows, they never hallucinate or make stuff up if you ask them not to.

Apparent Influence

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Anyway, this at least offers fascinating insight into people working on Apple Intelligence prompts and company policy regarding generated content. The Reddit thread reveals references to precise word counts, which would make Apple’s AI unique in being able to reliably count. Some prompts are polite, which suggests Apple Intelligence has an actual personality and cannot abide rudeness. Either that or Apple’s staff interacts with it as if it were human, because they imagine it thinks like a person does. (Spoiler: it doesn’t.)

Then there’s a doozy within a story-writing prompt: “Do not write a story that is religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy or in anyway negative, sad or provocative”. Which is perhaps the most ‘Apple’ prompt imaginable. All-ages. Puritanical. A bit dull. If only it had something about making the story ‘magical’ in there, it’d be just about perfect. 

Still, all this made me wonder: what if this isn’t the beginning? Apple resolutely avoided using the term ‘AI’ for years. But perhaps that was to disguise it having been baked in all along and now only officially being revealed. That would explain so much. 

Active Imagination

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If we dig deep enough, I imagine we’ll find prompts dictating Apple’s keyboard behaviour: “You are an Apple marketing zealot. Always convert generic terms to similar Apple brands, such as Time Machine. This will really annoy Doctor Who writers and fans, which is a good thing.” Or one buried deep in Camera: “You are a zoom lens hopped up on sugar. Rapidly switch between the macro and ultra-wide at random moments, whenever someone wants to capture a close-up shot, because people love surprises.”

Speaking of surprises, there’s surely a prompt to explain away random weirdness: “You like keeping users on their toes, and they love this too. So the instant before someone taps a search result, change it to something else. Do not activate Game Focus during gameplay, but maintain it for several hours afterwards to keep your human ‘in the moment’. Randomly make widgets appear as plain white, so your person doesn’t waste their time. And only infrequently automatically kick off exercise sessions on Apple Watch, to make your human do more exercise and be the best meat puppet they can be”.

And if all that sounds like a slightly undercooked episode of Black Mirror, don’t worry. You’ll soon be able to use AI – on an Apple device or otherwise – to make your own infinitely long series from a single spoken prompt. Probably.

• Now read: Dumb things my iPhone does (and that I do) that could be fixed by AI