They absolutely are. And you can turn them off. My comment is more about the technology industry’s general insistence on shoving AI down your throat whether or not it’s useful, usable, or desired.

I’m hopeful that whatever combination of factors at Apple prevent that from happening remain. Otherwise I’ll have to start considering GrapheneOS and defaulting to my Debian-based MacBook.

And I love it! The ocr/vision models are a literal life saver here. Translating websites in Safari? Even text in images gets translated, super convenient! The only gripe i have is that it tries to be smart and tries to detect addresses, phone numbers. If the address or phone number is part of a text it is nearly impossible to copy the whole text since the phone number gets prioritised over the text (so you can only copy or call the number… )

I've used macOS these days, give them a few years and they'll "catch up" I'm certain.