I thought Apple’s WWDC keynote showed some good uses for it, but you’re right, it kind of is just incremental, and may or may not be worth the privacy/compute cost. I personally am mostly excited that Siri will be able to contextualize my calendars, notes, messages, etc. There are lots of bits of information I’ve lost over the years, that isn’t actually lost, but just buried, and current search just isn’t up to the task of finding it. Or searching through notes: instead of having to remember when I took a note and where I asked it, I can just ask Siri a question and it’ll basically search through my notes and find the answer.
I also think it’s going to completely change academic research. Instead of going to Jstor and using a traditional search bar, you could just tell the AI assistant what you’re thinking about, what your theories are, etc, and it will search the catalog and find relevant sources for you. It removes a layer of friction, which I think will make a lot of people more efficient/effective.
The main argument I see against it is “well that is all well and good, but none of that will matter when the internet is full of AI-generated crap.” I mean yeah, that’s true, but the internet is already full of non-AI-generated crap. Sifting through the shitty ads and “sponsored posts” has already made the internet nearly unusable IMO. That’s a bigger problem that we need to deal with, that’s separate from AI.
That’s the fun part! When the US government is also in charge on enforcing the law, they can do whatever they want!