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> We believe in training our models using diverse and high-quality data. This includes data that we’ve licensed from publishers, curated from publicly available
by perfmode 1y ago
> We believe in training our models using diverse and high-quality data. This includes
data that we’ve licensed from publishers, curated from publicly available or open-
sourced datasets, and publicly available information crawled by our web-crawler,
Applebot.
> We do not use our users’ private personal data or user interactions when training
our foundation models. Additionally, we take steps to apply filters to remove certain
categories of personally identifiable information and to exclude profanity and unsafe
material.
> Further, we continue to follow best practices for ethical web crawling, including
following widely-adopted robots.txt protocols to allow web publishers to opt out
of their content being used to train Apple’s generative foundation models. Web
publishers have fine-grained controls over which pages Applebot can see and how
they are used while still appearing in search results within Siri and Spotlight.
Respect.
- epolanski 1y agoRespect actions, not words and PR.
- bitpush 1y agoWhen Apple inevitably partners with OpenAI or Anthropic, which by their definition isnt doing "ethical crawling", I wonder how I should be reading that.
- jhickok 1y agoThey already partnered with OpenAI, right?
- DSingularity 1y agoTo use their APIs at a discount, so what?
- JimDabell 1y agoApple aren’t paying OpenAI anything: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-12/apple-to-pay-openai-for-chatgpt-through-distribution-not-cash https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-12/apple-to-...
- sharkjacobs 1y agoThat's a big discount
- badwolf 1y agoThat's quite a discount! ;)
- arthurcolle 1y agoThe art of the deal
- aydyn 1y agoThey paid in exposure, unironically.
- fridder 1y agoSame way as the other parts of their supply chain I suppose.
- wmf 1y agoIn theory Apple could provide their training data to be used by OpenAI/Anthropic.
- bitpush 1y agoIt isn't "apple proprietary" data to give it to OpenAI. Also the bigger problem is, you can't train a good model with smaller data. The model would be subpar.
- bigyabai 1y ago"Good artists copy; great artists steal" - Famous Dead Person
- brookst 1y agoI mean they also buy from companies with less ethical supply chain practices than their own. I don’t know that I need to feel anything about that beyond recognizing there’s a big difference between exercising good practices and refusing to deal with anyone who does less.
- napierzaza 1y ago[dead]
- simonw 1y agoOne problem with Apple's approach here is that they were scraping the web for training data long before they published the details of their activities and told people how to exclude them using robots.txt
- dijit 1y agoUncharitable. Robots.txt is already the understood mechanism for getting robots to avoid scraping a website.
- simonw 1y agoPeople often use specific user agents in there, which is hard if you don't know what the user agents are in advance!
- wat10000 1y agoIf you're using a specific user agent, then you're saying "I want this specific user agent to follow this rule, and not any others." Don't be surprised when a new bot does what you say! If you don't want any bots reading something, use a wildcard.
- simonw 1y agoSure, but I still think it's OK to look at Apple with a raised eyebrow when they say "and our previously secret training data crawler obeys robots.txt so you can always opt out!"
- wat10000 1y agoI've been online since before the web existed, and this is the first time I've ever seen this idea of some implicit obligation to give people advance notice before you deploy a crawler. Looks to me like people are making up new rules on the fly because they don't like Apple and/or LLMs.
- astrange 1y ago> Using our web crawling strategy, we sourced pairs of images with corresponding alt-texts. An issue for anti-AI people, as seen on Bluesky, is that they're often "insisting you write alt text for all images" people as well. But this is probably the main use for alt text at this point, so they're essentially doing annotation work for free.
- simonw 1y agoI think it is entirely morally consistent to provide alt text for accessibility even if you personally dislike it being used to train AI models.
- astrange 1y agoIt's fine if you want to, but I think they should consider that basically nobody is reading it. If it was important for society, photo apps would prompt you to embed it in the image like EXIF. Computer vision is getting good enough to generate it; it has to be, because real-world objects don't have alt text.
- simonw 1y agoI actually use Claude to generate the first draft of most of my alt text, but I still do a manual review of it because LLMs usually don't have enough contents to fully understand the message I'm trying to convey with an image: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/2/accessibility-and-gen-ai/#alt-text https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/2/accessibility-and-gen-a...
- simonw 1y agoContext not content.
- lxgr 1y agoWhy would photo apps do what's "important for society"? Annotating photos takes time/effort, and I could totally imagine photo apps being resistant to prompting their users for that, some of which would undoubtedly find it annoying, and many more confusing. Yet I don't think that one can conclude from that that annotations aren't helpful/important to vision impaired users (at least until very recently, i.e. before the widespread availability of high quality automatic image annotations). In other words, the primary user base of photo editors isn't the set of people that would most benefit from it, which is probably why we started seeing "alt text nudging" first appear on social media, which has both producer and consumer in mind (at least more than photo editors).
- bigyabai 1y agoGotta polish that fig-leaf to hide Apple's real stance towards user privacy: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/ > Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information,"
- brookst 1y agoI mean if you throw out all contrary examples, I suppose you are left with the simple lack of nuance you want to believe
- bigyabai 1y agoAll examples contrary to what? Admitting to being muzzled by feds? Take all the space you need to lay out your contrary case. Did the San Bernadino shooter predict this?
- brookst 1y agoYou literally said that we should disregard this example and focus on the “real” situation as evidenced by a different example. It is exactly the same thing as saying “if you ignore the heads, these coins really always come up tails”. Does the Chewbacca argument method ever work these days?
- aydyn 1y agoRespect, but its going to be terrible compared to every other company. You can only hamstring yourself so much.
- darkoob12 1y agoYou shouldn't believe Big Tech on their PR statements. They are decades behind in AI. I have been following AI research for a long time. You can find best papers published by Microsoft, Google, Facebook in past 15 years but not Apple. I don't know why but they didn't care about AI at all. I would say this is PR to justify their AI state.
- ACCount36 1y agoApple used to be at the edge of AI. They shipped Siri before "AI assistant" went mainstream, they were one of the first to ship an actual NPU in consumer hardware and put neural networks into features people use. They were spearheading computational photography. They didn't publish research, they're fucking Apple, but they did do the work. And then they just... gave up? I don't know what happened to them. When AI breakthrough happened, I expected them to put up a fight. They never did.
- mlnj 1y ago>I don't know what happened to them. When AI breakthrough happened, I expected them to put up a fight. They never did. Apple always had the luxury of time. They work heavily on integrating deeply into their ecosystems without worrying about the pace of the latest development. eg. Widgets were a 2023 feature for iOS. They do it late, but do it well. The development in the LLM space was and is too fast for Apple to compete in. They usually pave their own path and stay in their lane as a leader. The impact on Apple's brand image will be tarnished if Google, Meta, OpenAI, MS all leapfrog Apple's models every 2-3 months. That's just not what the Apple brand is associated with.
- lynx97 1y ago> I don't know what happened to them. Tim Cook happened. The fish rots from the head down.
- LoganDark 1y agoIt's more like "Steve Jobs died". I'm not sure anyone could have replaced him.