Comment by zzyzxd

It's a common pattern in Apple products. They make it hard to turn off settings they really don't want you to turn off.

Another example is advertising. Apple made it easy for you to turn off advertising tracking for non-Apple things.

Apple made it very confusing to turn off advertising tracking for Apple things, including having a different setting for this to begin with.

Apple's assumption seems to be that the only reason you'd want to turn the LLM features off as a consumer is that you're a parent and you don't want your children interacting with LLMs. So they put it where "parent trying to lock down their child's computer" settings are.

(If you look, most other toggles that appear under "Content & Privacy Restrictions" are for similar things: things Apple provides no more-visible setting to disable; because they think you have "no reason" to turn these features off; because these features are, at least in Apple's opinion, "unobtrusive" [i.e. only really doing something if explicitly activated] and "costless.")

In contrast, I presume the underlying setting identifier, as appears in `defaults` and/or MDM profiles, has a more sensible hierarchical prefix based on what potential risks an organization would see in a roll-out of LLM use.

ETA: yes: the macOS settings domain for "LLM stuff" is `com.apple.applicationaccess`, and the declarative-configuration namespace is `com.apple.configuration.intelligence.settings`. Neither of which has anything to do with parental controls per se (though `com.apple.applicationaccess` is generally where MDM settings related to preventing employees from using "potentially insecure" device capabilities live.)

There's also the declarative-configuration namespace of `com.apple.configuration.external-intelligence.settings` ...which is a bit of a bass-ackwards use of their own declarative configuration model, since if it had been `com.apple.configuration.intelligence.external.settings` instead, then the settings in the enclosing "intelligence" namespace would serve as fallback defaults for the external-intelligence specific settings. Ah well.

The settings menus in recent iOS & macOS releases have been an absolute mess.

Even worse, once you're there, you toggle _on_ "Content & Privacy", and then what?

What does the toggle on for "Image creation" mean? Is that now restricted? Or is toggle off mean it is restricted?

And people complained about Symbian menus...

Probably it is under Privacy because one day it will be transcribing everything you say and sending to government.

They already gave idea with client side scanning and now UK government will mandate that.

The next step is conversations.

Wow insane.

Ah yes, bad design, something Apple is famous for.

This is obviously intentional.

It's searchable