> 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.

When Apple inevitably partners with OpenAI or Anthropic, which by their definition isnt doing "ethical crawling", I wonder how I should be reading that.

You 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.

One 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

Respect, but its going to be terrible compared to every other company. You can only hamstring yourself so much.

> 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.

Respect actions, not words and PR.

Gotta 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,"