Suppose you glance around in class and notice the person in front of you is taking way better notes than you are. An iPhone running iOS 15 makes grabbing a copy easy as pie without the hassle of asking permission — thanks to the magic of Live Text.
A video of this happening in the real world that was posted on Twitter is going viral. Watch it now.
Copy someone’s notes with a *click* and Live Text
The viral Twitter post from Juan Buis says, “students are starting to steal each other’s notes with iOS 15 and it’s… kind of genius.”
students are starting to steal each other's notes with iOS 15 and it's… kind of genius pic.twitter.com/klE992DuBn
— juan (@juanbuis) October 14, 2021
It demonstrates the capabilities of Live Text, a new feature in iOS 15. This copies the words out of images and lets you paste them into notes, emails, etc.
As shown in the video, it’s possible to surreptitiously snap a picture of some else’s computer screen and then use Live Text to copy the class notes out of it.
Of course, it’s been possible to do a basic version of this for many years. Someone could take picture of a classmate’s notes and then manually type out the text on their own. But Live Text makes this process far easier.
Obviously, this wasn’t what Apple had in mind when it added this feature to iOS 15. It was thinking instead about making it easy to grab a copy what a professor wrote on a whiteboard so students could pay attention to what was being said. But anything that can be used can also be abused.
