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On the surface, Apples announcement on Tuesday of a subscription service called Apple Creator Studio does not demand a whole lot of explanation or analysis. The Mac/iPad/iPhone offering, which bundles the Final Cut Pro video editor, Logic Pro audio editor, Pixelmator Pro image editor, and other apps for making and manipulating media for $13 a month or $129 a year, is exactly the sort of thing youd expect the company to get around to introducing. After all, its strategy of expanding the portion of its revenue that comes from services has already resulted in offerings such as Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, and Apple News+. It would have been weird if Apple hadnt pushed its creativity apps in a service-y directiona process that began a couple of years ago when the first iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro carried subscription pricing. But Creator Studio, which arrives in the App Store on January 28, also ties together several other ongoing plot lines relating to Apples business. Its very existence helps answer questions about how the company sees AI as a creative tool. The company has the opportunity to address others as it builds out the product in the coming years. I spoke with Apples VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers, and senior director of Worldwide Product Marketing Brent Chiu-Watson, about the new servicestarting with the fundamental question of what sort of people they envision using it. Creator Studio subscribers will be able to generate images using OpenAIs models inside apps such as Keynote. [Photo: Apple] Apples history in creativity software is long: For example, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro both date to the previous century. Yet at times, it hasnt been entirely clear whether the company saw the customer base for such tools as consisting literally of professionals, prosumers whod outgrown products such as iMovie and GarageBand, or some combination thereof. Even now, Creator Studio does not add up to a full-blooded rival to Adobes Creative Cloud, which offers many more apps in various editions at much higher prices, up to $70 a month for the full shebang. Still, Borchers offered me a reasonably crisp definition of Creator Studios intended audience: creators who, increasingly, do a little bit of everything. A musician isn’t just songwriting, he told me. They’re producing the tracks, they’re creating album artwork, they’re editing music videos, they’re designing merch. They’re doing all of those things, and they’re inherently working across some of those traditional boundaries. With that in mind, Apple is spreading useful functionality between Creator Studios apps in ways that share the wealth and reduce the learning curve. For example, Pixelmator Proa much-loved indie app whose developer Apple acquired last yearalready had AI-infused features that can intelligently auto-crop images and scale them up without losing detail. Now, Creator Studio subscribers will find the same tools in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. Similarly, Logic Pros Beat Detection feature, which uses AI to visualize an audio tracks tempo, will be available in Final Cut Pro as well, where it will help creators edit video to stay in sync with what audiences hear. Beat Detection, which visualizes beats and bars, is available in Final Cut Pro as well as Logic Pro. [Photo: Apple] The more features that show up in multiple apps, the more Creator Studio should feel like a coherent suite with a unified personality. That sort of consistency, we think, is really, really valuable, and we’re going to find more connection points over time, says Chiu-Watson. Its no shock that the new features Creator Studio is launching with are largely about AI-based assistance. Some run on-device and use Apples own technology, including visual and audio search options that can find media such as a track with funky upbeat drum. Others draw on OpenAI cloud-based models, like image-generation options that go beyond Apple Intelligences Image Playgrounds, as well as Keynote’s newfound ability to turn text outlines into presentations and write speaker notes for slides. (Googles Gemini LLM plays no role in Creator Studio, though given the new Apple-Google AI partnership announced on Monday, its tough to imagine that will stay true forever.) Creator Studios Mac apps inclde MainStage, a sort of industrial-strength counterpart to GarageBand. [Photo: Apple] Applewhich is still an underdog in AI but has learned to be sensitive about suggesting that its trying to automate deeply human tasksis taking pains to emphasize that its not trying to turn content creation over to algorithms. Nor is it (or OpenAI) training models on the media people produce in Creator Studio. The key thing is, we’re doing this with the philosophy that AI should amplify one’s ideas and not replace any piece of human artistry or creativity, says Chiu-Watson. We’re just trying to make someone more efficient as they explore their process. As someone whos used an iPad as my primary work computer for almost 15 years, I am heartened by the fact that Creator Studio represents the iPad debut of Pixelmator Pro. The app supports drawing with pressure-sensitive art materials via the Pencil stylus, and is particularly welcome given that Adobes iPad version of Photoshop remains a dim echo of the desktop version. (Pixelmators sister app Photomatora rough counterpart to Apples Lightroom, and an essential part of my own iPad toolkitis not part of the new suite, and remains available via standalone subscription.) For years, the iPad Pros powerful hardware has felt like its sprinted well ahead of most of the apps it runs. Creator Studio wont change that overnight. But it does give Apple new incentive to beef up its own iPad softwarea boon in itself and, with any luck, a good example for other developers. Our guiding principle here is we wanted to put the most powerful tools in the hands of our creative community wherever they are, says Borchers. The new iPad version of Pixelmator Pro offers Pencil support and drawing tools that go beyond garden-variety image editing. [Photo: Apple] The price of progress It must be acknowledged that the shift in business model reflected in Creator Studios bundling of apps for a monthly or yearly feerather than a one-time priceis not going to be universally hailed. Just ask Adobe, whose Creative Cloud has managed to disaffect a meaningful percentage of creative types who want nothing to do with subscription plans. (Some of those users have gravitated to apps from Affinity, whose new owner Canva recently crammed photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout into one free product.) To be fair, Apple has gone to some length to allay such concerns, at least for the moment. All Mac apps in Creator Studio will remain available as one-time purchases in the App Store. The company is also grandfathering in users who had standalone subscriptions to the iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro and prefer to keep them, though some content may be exclusive to the Creator Studio versions. Until now, the only version of Pixelmator available for the iPad has been a basic, non-Pro edition; Apple says it wont get any more updates, but will remain functional. Apple fans with long memories may remember the long-ago days when Apple packaged Keynote, Numbers, and Pages into a $79 Microsoft Office alternative called iWork. More recently, its shipped them gratis on every new device. Only paying customers will get the new AI features that turn these appsand the Freeform whiteboarding toolinto sort of honorary members of the Creator Studio portfolio. But Chiu-Watson told me that the free versions arent turning into dead ends or demoware. Indeed, theyll continue to get upgrades of their own. Some premium features and premium content are only for subscribers, but that’s just a choice, he says. You can opt in, [but] theres no necessity to do so. In the end, Creator Studio, like any software experience, will speak for itself, in large part through how it evolves over time. Having assembled its disparate elements and given them an initial round of updates, Apple has the opportunity to keep the momentum going through ongoing improvements that make the price feel like money well invested. As Chiu-Watson puts it, We hope people pay attention, because it’s one thing what we say. Its another how we exemplify it.
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E-Commerce
One thing has become reliable over the past year of worldwide uncertainty: the price of gold and silver has continued to rise. The precious metals reached record highs again in the early hours of Wednesday. Silver hit over $91 per ounce, more than a 26% increase year-to-date and a 201% increase over the last 12 months. Silver had reached more than $90 for the first time on Tuesday. Meanwhile, gold rose this morning to more than $4,637 an ounceup more than 7% in 2026 and over 73% for the past year. Why do gold and silver continue to rise? Gold hit a record $4,600 an ounce on Monday after news broke that federal prosecutors are investigating Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Officially, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia is looking into $2.5 billion spent to renovate the Federal Reserve headquarters. However, President Trump has made his disdain for Powell well known, with the latter refusing Trumps demands to slash interest rates. In a video statement, Powell pointed to the current administrations pattern of going after anyone who dares to disagree with it. No onecertainly not the chair of the Federal Reserveis above the law, said Powell. But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administrations threats and ongoing pressure. This development occurred as tumultuous news around the worldnotably, Irans mass executions of protestershas pushed investors toward safe havens like gold and silver. As for silver, the increase could also be attributed to Chinas recent restrictions on exporting the metal, limiting access to it in the U.S. A January 2025 report from the U.S. Geological Survey stated that China is one of the largest silver producers in the world.
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E-Commerce
For as long as people have been using AI to churn out text, other people have been coming up with tells that something was written by AI. Sometimes its punctuation that comes under suspicion. (The em dash is generally considered the shadiest.) Other times its words that robot writers seem to love and overuse. But what if the biggest giveaway that a text was written by AI isnt a word, phrase, or punctuation mark, but a particular sentence structure instead? Why is it so hard to make AI writing sound human? The idea that certain rhythms of sentences might be a sign of AI writing first came to my attention through my work as a professional word nerd. Recently, I a potential new client contacted me about helping to polish up some of their writing. As an editor, thats not unusual. But like several recent inquiries, this assignment came with an AI-age twist. The client had conducted a good amount of research for a work project and then asked a popular LLM to synthesize the findings. Afterward, they checked it for factual errors and removed anything that seemed an obvious red flag for AI writing. But the text still just didnt sound human. Could I fix it? I agreed that despite the clients considerable efforts, something still sounded off about the text. I also concurred it wasnt immediately easy to spot what it was. All the commonly cited tells of AI writing had been removed. There wasnt an em dash or a delves in sight. Still, it felt like it came from a bot, not a human. The problem was clearly deeper than word choice. I faced this dilemma from the perspective of a communications pro. But there are plenty of others scratching their heads over the same issue. These are the entrepreneurs, marketers, and others who want to use AI to speed up their workflows but dont want to annoy others with robotic off-note emails and reports. The group also includes writer Sam Kriss. AI tells are more than weird words and punctuation In a fascinating article in The New York TImes Magazine, Kriss delves into the stylistic tics that are certain, frequently infuriating, tells of AI writing. Unlike more quantitatively focused recent studies, he doesnt focus on easy-to-measure features like the frequency of certain words or punctuation marks. Instead, he investigates the larger patterns in AI writing that contribute to its uncanny and often deeply annoying feel. AI, for instance, lacks any direct experience of the physical world. As a result, AI writing tends to be full of imprecise abstractions. There are a lot of mixed metaphors. Bots also overuse the rule of three. (Lists of descriptors or examples are generally more satisfying for the reader in groups of three.) Phrases that are common in one country or context are reproduced in others where they sound foreign. If youre either a language lover despairing about the current flood of AI slop or a practically minded professional looking to use AI without irritating human readers, the article is definitely worth a read. But one of Krisss observations in particular set alarm bells ringing in my mind. ‘Its not X. Its Y’ Im driven to the point of fury by any sentence following the pattern Its not X, its Y, even though this totally normal construction appears in such generally well-received bodies of literature as the Bible and Shakespeare, he writes. Kriss goes on to cite instances of this Its not X, its Y sentence construction in everything from politicians tweets to pizza ads. Appearances in great literature notwithstanding, the recent flood of examples has transformed this phrasing into a sure-fire way to know youre reading something written by a machine. Hmm, I thought, reopening my clients document. Sure enough, when I reread my new clients oddly mechanical writing, I saw that particular sentence construction in nearly every paragraph. One AI tell thats easy to scrub Getting rid of all the giveaways that a particular text is written by AI is difficult. It might just take you longer to do a thorough scrub job than to just actually put in the intitial effort to write the thing yourself. (Which is, as a side note, what I often tell clients looking for this sort of editorial work.) Plus, writing is good for your brain. In other instances of more mechanistic writing, keeping AI style might not matter. Who cares about the literary merits of the executive summary of a data analysis if the numbers and the takeaways are correct? If thats the case, dont sweat the odd, Its not X. Its Y. But if youre producing ad copy, a presentation, or persuasive content and you want the reader to feel like a human actually wrote it, Krisss article is a helpful reminder. Sure, certain words or language ticks might be more common in AI writing. But the overall problem is usually deeper. If you really want to try to make AI language passably human, you need to worry not just about word choice and eliminating hallucinations. You need to look more deeply at the way the sentences are constructed. And you definitely want to avoid Its not x. Its y. As a bot might put it, this sentence structure isnt just a cliché. Its now a dead giveaway that AI wrote the text.
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E-Commerce
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