Apple Intelligence isn’t entirely Apple’s intelligence; just like so many other artificial intelligence (AI) tools, it also leans into all the human experience shared on the internet because all that data informs the AI models the company builds.
That said, the company explained where it gets the information it uses when it announced Apple Intelligence last month: “We train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web-crawler, AppleBot,” Apple explained.
Your internet, their product
Apple isn’t alone in doing this. In using the public internet this way, it is following the same approach as others in the business. The problem: that approach is already generating arguments between copyright holders and AI firms, as both sides grapple with questions around copyright, fair use, and the extent to which data shared online is commodified to pour even more cash into the pockets of Big Tech firms.