My wife was in her first trimester when my mother made the suggestion, “I hope you keep a journal.” Your baby will really enjoy discovering these first days. And then this was my therapist during the first weeks of our daughter’s life: “You should try keeping a journal to help you process whatever you’re feeling.” » I thought to myself last week, “I should really start journaling in the new year.” »
We all know the advice, and even the urge, to keep a journal. This is a first draft of your personal story and one of the best mindfulness exercises you can do. Although journalism is my day job, I’ve always struggled to put my inner monologue on a page or collect memories into a book. There’s a shelf full of mostly blank Moleskine notebooks next to my desk to prove it. There’s also about 10 years of raw material for a rich, detailed journal hidden in my phone’s notes, photos, and bookmarks. If only a tech company could come along and help me organize them into my life story.
This week, Apple did just that with the release of an app called – you guessed it – Journal. The app is free with the latest iOS update, and it’s dead simple: just a single blank landing page with a plus sign at the bottom that lets you add entries. These could be recent photos, calendar events, workouts, or podcasts you’ve listened to. The app also suggests adding so-called Moments, in which you can create an entry from, for example, a podcast you listened to and a photo you took during a walk in the park. You can even use the share button in apps like Safari or Notes to create an entry from a web page or block of text. According to Apple, machine learning, a relative of AI, powers the suggestions the app makes for Moments, but beyond that, it’s unclear how AI can be factored into the app. ‘experience.
What’s cool about the Journal app is a new protocol that lets other journaling apps suggest entries based on photos and recent activity on your iPhone. It’s part of a set of privacy options Apple is rolling out that allow third-party apps to view your photos without accessing much of the associated data. (Think about it this way: Instead of giving Instagram full access to all your photos, the new privacy option could mean Instagram can show you thumbnails of the photos without having full access to the image metadata .) And while artificial intelligence continues to advance. In your daily life, this little bit of extra control might seem significant to you. There’s no indication that Apple has any big AI-based dreams behind its new logging prompts, but I like the idea of giving a tech company as much information about me as I want while still benefiting from a personalized experience. At the very least, these slightly more automated entries might make my journaling goal more achievable.
It’s actually proven that keeping a journal is good for you. A 2022 meta-analysis of nearly 3,800 studies exploring the impact of journaling on several mental health conditions found real benefits for practice, at least enough for the review authors to recommend primary care providers to at least suggest this practice. After all, there are very few side effects and virtually no costs associated with writing down your thoughts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even recommends keeping a journal to help regulate stress and, in turn, blood sugar levels.
Tech companies have been trying to make logging a reality since the early days of the internet, and in some cases it has worked incredibly well. Remember LiveJournal and Tumblr – or, for that matter, Blogger? The most recent trend is looking inward. There are now countless apps that allow you to store as many details as you want about your personal life in one place, many of which have wellness or mindfulness features that pester you with notifications to save your mood throughout the day. Journaling apps are seemingly meant for your eyes only, and they are surely useful to many people for countless reasons. But for people who have experienced Facebook’s quest to help you share everything about your life – only to see that very personal data end up in third-party hands, often fueling hyper-targeted ads – logging in an app may not not seem so private. . The idea of an AI-powered journal may seem downright scary.
But many apps that ask for very personal information have pivoted to the need for privacy. A number of journaling apps, including Day One and Stoic, allow you to put a biometric lock on your journal, the 21st century equivalent of a padlock attached to a book that you hide in a shoebox under your bed. For a monthly subscription, both of these apps also allow you to encrypt your data so that no one but you can read it. They’re nifty apps, but I have enough trouble writing in my journal when it’s free.
Apple’s new Journal app suggests a different approach. Because it is integrated with the iOS 17 operating system, it is not only free but also encrypted by default. It can easily access anything you let it on your phone, and I can already tell from the suggestions that most of the time my phone remembers what I’ve done better than I do. If you’ve spent a lot of time in the Photos app, you’ll know that the AI-generated slideshows are full of fun trips down memory lane. (It’s worth pointing out here that Google offers similar photo curation features for Android phones, although I’m not aware of any plans for a Google-created journaling app.)
None of this means you should start journaling on your iPhone. The Journal app is only a few days old and I can’t really recommend it until I’m sure it helped me keep my New Year’s resolution to record more precious memories of my daughter again -born. I do think, however, that we are starting to see a shift in how we remember things and how our memories work – all with more and more help from the devices we constantly interact with. It occurs to me that Apple’s interest in logging is actually an interest in learning more about iPhone users, with the goal of creating a more intuitive computing experience, which will inevitably rely more on AI.
As 2023 draws to a close, we’re sure to see plenty of homages to ChatGPT and similar technologies. It was a big year for AI-based objects! But I would argue that smaller, more subtle changes in how software works will define the coming year. It’s certainly possible that the AI revolution will be noisy, upending entire industries in the blink of an eye. But I think it will be quiet, at least at first. Maybe it’s as simple as an app that knows when and how to help you remember the moments you never want to forget, without even thinking about writing them down in a dusty book.
A version of this story also appeared in the Vox Technology newsletter. register here so as not to miss the next one!
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