6 ms·

Apple just did more to make this a privacy focused feature versus just a data mine than literally anyone else to date and still people complain. Public content

Apple just did more to make this a privacy focused feature versus just a data mine than literally anyone else to date and still people complain. Public content on the internet is public content on the internet - I thought we had all agreed years ago that if you didn’t want your content copied, don’t make it freely available and unlicensed on the internet.

advael 2y ago
No, they said they did. Huge difference
- threeseed 2y ago
  It was mentioned in the keynote that they allow researchers to audit their claims.
  - advael 2y ago
    And as soon as independent sources support that they've made good on this claim it will be more than a claim. I actually am impressed by the link I missed and was provided elsewhere in this thread, and I hope to also be impressed when this claim is actually realized and we have more details about it
AshamedCaptain 2y ago
What ? What did they do? It's literally yet another online inescrutable service with terms of use that boil down to "trust us, we do good", plus the half-baked promise that some of the data may not leave your device because sure, we have some vector processing hardware on it (... which hardware announced this year doesn't do that?). Frankly I tried a samsung device which I would have assume is the worst here, and the promises are exactly the same. They show you two prompts, one for locally processed services (e.g. translation), and one when data is about to leave your device, and you can accept or reject them separately. But both of them are basically unverifiable promises and closed source services.
layer8 2y ago
Public content is still subject to copyright, and I doubt that AppleBot only scrapes content carrying a suitable license. And "fair use" (which is unclear if it applies), in case you want to invoke it, is a notion limited to the US and only a handful of other countries.
- xena 2y ago
  All you have to do is drop a token swear word into your content and they remove it from the dataset. Easy.
  - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
    Why would they? From the moderate of testing I've done of their handwriting recognition on an ipad, they seem to have everything risqué/offensive I could think of in there, even if you have to write it more clearly than other words. I don't expect this to be much different, other than a word filter on the output.
    - xena 2y ago
      I mean for their large language model training. They said they don't include low quality data and swearing. This means you can get out of it by swearing.
kmeisthax 2y ago
Oh no, don't get me wrong. I like the privacy features, it's already way better than OpenAI's "we make it proprietary so we can spy on you" approach. What I don't like is the hypocrisy that basically every AI company has engaged in, where copying my shit is OK but copying theirs is not. The Internet is not public domain, as much as Eric Bauman and every AI research team would say otherwise. Even if you don't like copyright[0], you should care about copyleft, because denying valuable creative work to the proprietary world is how you get them to concede. If you can shove that work into an AI and get the benefits of that knowledge without the licensing requirement, then copyleft is useless as a tactic to get the proprietary world to bend the knee. [0] And I don't. My opinion is that individual copyright ownership is a bad deal for most artists and we need collective negotiation instead. Even the most copyright-respecting, 'ethical' AI boils down to Adobe dropping a EULA roofie in the Adobe Stock Contributor Agreement that lets them pay you pennies.
- ssahoo 2y ago
  Where did you get the idea that's its way better than openai's? Aren't they both proprietary?
  - immibis 2y ago
    Without the "so we can spy on you" part.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      But they won't even make good on that: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-... There's your bleeding, sorry truth there. It's only a matter of time until we get another headline like it.
      - musictubes 2y ago
        The article did say Apple was compelled to supply the data. Not sure what your point is.
karaterobot 2y ago
Is that how copyright works now? I didn't see that they'd changed that law.
meatmanek 2y ago
> I thought we had all agreed years ago that if you didn’t want your content copied, don’t make it freely available and unlicensed on the internet. Until LLMs came along, most large-scale internet scraping was for search engines. Websites benefited from this arrangement because search engines directed users to those websites. LLMs abused this arrangement to scrape content into a local database, compress that into a language model, and then serve the content directly to the user without directing the user to the website. It might've been legal, but that doesn't mean it was ethical.
- c1sc0 2y ago
  In my view it’s ethical even if it’s just for taking revenge on the ad-driven model that has caused the enshittification of the web.
  - data-ottawa 2y ago
    I think you mean it’s justified, not ethical.
mepian 2y ago
Who are "we" here? Did you abolish the Berne Convention somehow?
madeofpalk 2y ago
You seen to misunderstand what licensing , or ‘unlicensed’, actually means. If I write a story a publish it freely on line to my website it’s not ’unlicensed’ in a way that means anyone had the right to yank it and republish it. Even though it’s freely available, I still own the copyright of it. Similarly, we don’t say that GPL-ed code is ‘unlicensed’ just because it is available for free. It has a license, which defines very specific terms that must be followed.
afavour 2y ago
I’m sorry but I really dislike this perspective. “Every one else has been awful. Apple is being less awful and you’re still complaining?” Yeah, I’m complaining. We all agreed years ago to web indexing conventions still in practise today. No, no one is obliged to follow them but you can rest assured I’ll complain about them. There was a time when the web felt like a cooperative place, these days it’s just value extraction after value extraction.

advael 2y ago

No, they said they did. Huge difference

threeseed 2y ago
It was mentioned in the keynote that they allow researchers to audit their claims.
- advael 2y ago
  And as soon as independent sources support that they've made good on this claim it will be more than a claim. I actually am impressed by the link I missed and was provided elsewhere in this thread, and I hope to also be impressed when this claim is actually realized and we have more details about it

AshamedCaptain 2y ago

What ? What did they do? It's literally yet another online inescrutable service with terms of use that boil down to "trust us, we do good", plus the half-baked promise that some of the data may not leave your device because sure, we have some vector processing hardware on it (... which hardware announced this year doesn't do that?). Frankly I tried a samsung device which I would have assume is the worst here, and the promises are exactly the same. They show you two prompts, one for locally processed services (e.g. translation), and one when data is about to leave your device, and you can accept or reject them separately. But both of them are basically unverifiable promises and closed source services.

layer8 2y ago

Public content is still subject to copyright, and I doubt that AppleBot only scrapes content carrying a suitable license. And "fair use" (which is unclear if it applies), in case you want to invoke it, is a notion limited to the US and only a handful of other countries.

xena 2y ago
All you have to do is drop a token swear word into your content and they remove it from the dataset. Easy.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
  Why would they? From the moderate of testing I've done of their handwriting recognition on an ipad, they seem to have everything risqué/offensive I could think of in there, even if you have to write it more clearly than other words. I don't expect this to be much different, other than a word filter on the output.
  - xena 2y ago
    I mean for their large language model training. They said they don't include low quality data and swearing. This means you can get out of it by swearing.

kmeisthax 2y ago

Oh no, don't get me wrong. I like the privacy features, it's already way better than OpenAI's "we make it proprietary so we can spy on you" approach. What I don't like is the hypocrisy that basically every AI company has engaged in, where copying my shit is OK but copying theirs is not. The Internet is not public domain, as much as Eric Bauman and every AI research team would say otherwise. Even if you don't like copyright[0], you should care about copyleft, because denying valuable creative work to the proprietary world is how you get them to concede. If you can shove that work into an AI and get the benefits of that knowledge without the licensing requirement, then copyleft is useless as a tactic to get the proprietary world to bend the knee. [0] And I don't. My opinion is that individual copyright ownership is a bad deal for most artists and we need collective negotiation instead. Even the most copyright-respecting, 'ethical' AI boils down to Adobe dropping a EULA roofie in the Adobe Stock Contributor Agreement that lets them pay you pennies.

ssahoo 2y ago
Where did you get the idea that's its way better than openai's? Aren't they both proprietary?
- immibis 2y ago
  Without the "so we can spy on you" part.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    But they won't even make good on that: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-... There's your bleeding, sorry truth there. It's only a matter of time until we get another headline like it.
    - musictubes 2y ago
      The article did say Apple was compelled to supply the data. Not sure what your point is.

karaterobot 2y ago

Is that how copyright works now? I didn't see that they'd changed that law.

meatmanek 2y ago

> I thought we had all agreed years ago that if you didn’t want your content copied, don’t make it freely available and unlicensed on the internet. Until LLMs came along, most large-scale internet scraping was for search engines. Websites benefited from this arrangement because search engines directed users to those websites. LLMs abused this arrangement to scrape content into a local database, compress that into a language model, and then serve the content directly to the user without directing the user to the website. It might've been legal, but that doesn't mean it was ethical.

c1sc0 2y ago
In my view it’s ethical even if it’s just for taking revenge on the ad-driven model that has caused the enshittification of the web.
- data-ottawa 2y ago
  I think you mean it’s justified, not ethical.

mepian 2y ago

Who are "we" here? Did you abolish the Berne Convention somehow?

madeofpalk 2y ago

You seen to misunderstand what licensing , or ‘unlicensed’, actually means. If I write a story a publish it freely on line to my website it’s not ’unlicensed’ in a way that means anyone had the right to yank it and republish it. Even though it’s freely available, I still own the copyright of it. Similarly, we don’t say that GPL-ed code is ‘unlicensed’ just because it is available for free. It has a license, which defines very specific terms that must be followed.

afavour 2y ago

I’m sorry but I really dislike this perspective. “Every one else has been awful. Apple is being less awful and you’re still complaining?” Yeah, I’m complaining. We all agreed years ago to web indexing conventions still in practise today. No, no one is obliged to follow them but you can rest assured I’ll complain about them. There was a time when the web felt like a cooperative place, these days it’s just value extraction after value extraction.