The other day a friend pointed out that using ChatGPT (and the like) for automation purposes is making real the original promise of AppleScript — being able to describe automation tasks using natural language. As I wrote long ago, the idea behind AppleScript was noble, but the truth is that it is a programming language, and in practice it has ultimately frustrated everyone. Programmers find it weird and clumsy compared to scripting languages that don’t attempt to hide that they’re programming languages, and non-programmers find it confusing because it doesn’t really parse natural language at all — it only parses a very specific syntax that happens to look like natural language, but isn’t like natural language is used or understood at all.
That's the key with ChatGPT being super successful with non-nerds; it's parsing of natural language.
Like Viticci, I remain largely skeptical and uncomfortable with AI for purposes of generating original new stuff — writing, imagery, whatever. But as an assistive agent, it’s quite remarkable today and improving at a fast clip.
Not only is using Apple Intelligence for automation more accessible (in every sense) than writing a programming script or creating a Shortcut, it’s also something we’re all much more likely to do for a one-time task. I often create scripts, shortcuts, and macros to automate tasks that recur with some frequency; I seldom do for tasks that I’m only going to do once. But why not use Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT to save a few minutes of tedium?
Yep agree with this.