Technical explanation:
iOS apps cannot add systemwide actions in context menus, like for text selection. At best, they can create a sharing extension to have their app shown in the share sheet (page where you select who you send something to) and potentially add an action for easier discovery.
The only place they can add a systemwide actions is in their own app, hence why only the ChatGPT app has the Ask ChatGPT action.
You guys are actually using chat GPT?
Nah, I feel like it’s one of those trade offer memes:
I get: To replace your critical thinking skills
You get: To help us use the energy and water equivalent to a small nation
Never felt like a good deal, you know?
Yeah, but why are you asking like you wonder?
have you tried looking up anything recently? the internet sucks, and it’s only getting worse.
If I ask the lying machine, I’ll at least get an answer. There’s a not insignificant chance that the answer will be wrong, but at least it’s an answer.
Bwahahahahaha a wrong answer is not an answer. Thats how misinformation spreads. SMH
laugh all you want. This is the reality we live in. It sucks and I hate it, but there’s not much I can do about it.
Just wait for the bubble to pop. In the meantime learn to use your brain while others are giving themselves brain atrophy.
If you’re using one of the LLMs to search, you can just twirl out the source list and click through to the pages it found relevant to your prompt. In my experience, it pulls a better list of links than DDG or Google. You can just ignore the summary it writes.
I don’t input anything that I care about them spying on. As for brain rot, we’re on social media, aren’t we?
So you say but they are slowly giving Ai root access.
You also are forgetting the environment impacts this slop is having.
https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
Comparing the brainrot from Ai to using a federated communication network is fucking pathetic.
Wow, you pivot a lot. The power consumption of data centers as a whole in the US was ~5% of total in 2024. But they are definitely guzzling water, no doubt about that. It’d be nice if we still had environmental regulatory agencies with teeth to force better cooling methods. Doug Forcett comes to mind.
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The context menu can be controlled by the app, which is why you see “Ask ChatGPT” only within their app. Everywhere else, the context menu is the default one of Apple. Apple’s AI tanked, which I believe is a reason you do not have it in the context menu.
Is this some sort of iPhone thing I’m not getting, or what?
When you select text, you get options like Cut/Copy/Paste, Look Up, etc. Text things.
Apps can add their own actions next to these, such as the ChatGPT app adding the Ask ChatGPT action.
The thing is, iOS does not allow custom actions to be used outside the app which added them. So the Ask ChatGPT action only appears in the ChatGPT app and nowhere else where one would benefit from a quick shortcut like that.
The action is now mostly useless if it can’t serve the purpose of being a shortcut to ChatGPT from any text selection anywhere, because once you’re in the ChatGPT app, you could just ask - shortcut not needed.
Or how about you think for yourself. Don’t plop your brain in a jar and outsource your own mental processes.
We outsource various processes all the time. I can learn to cook a good meal, or I can go to a variety of restaurants. I can build my own house, or I can buy or rent. I can learn about a topic, or I can ask someone in the field and get an overview of the topic to better direct my own studies. I can type a request into a search engine, review the results, and select the one I believe is most relevant for me. I can ask a question in some LLM AI or other, review their sources, and pick the one most relevant to me.
We already outsource a lot of our brains to other devices. This is why writing was invented. Certainly, using AI to do the thinking for you can have negative consequences. Using AI as a search engine, likely less so, or no worse than using a more legacy search engine would. There are other very good reasons to not use AI in a lot arenas, which is why I very rarely use it. But even a bad tool can have utility in the right circumstance.
The right circumstances is corporate greed and dumbing down the general public. Ai are tools of capitalism.
You know what else they are?
They literally make people dumber:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/18/is_ai_changing_our_brains/
They are a massive privacy risk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyH7zoP-JOg&t=3015s
They are being used to push fascist ideologies into every aspect of the internet:
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/
AND they are a massive environmental disaster:
https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
Ai apologists get blocked.
My eyes can’t roll hard enough. Start throwing the sabots, they won’t bother me. The current shit the public is being sold as AI is very likely a dead end, but AI will be doing a better diagnosis than doctors soon enough, and already is in a number of medical fields. If you or others don’t have the cognitive ability to assess the various branches of artificial intelligence, well, then you aren’t doing any better than the people pushing the current consumer AI. As far as the progress of technology goes, this dance has been done many times before and always ends the same way.
