Three months ago, Apple introduced a tool that makes it easy for companies to opt out of AI training, and it appears that several major companies have already used it.
Unlike Google, Apple offers companies millions of dollars to allow its AI to use crawlers to search data to train Apple Intelligence. As part of the deal, companies can specify that certain files be excluded from training the AI. This omission is controlled by an extension of Applebots. Applebots were originally released in 2015 and were designed to crawl the internet to power features like Siri and Spotlight, but have since been repurposed to train Apple Intelligence.
Apple has integrated a new extension called Applebot-extended that allows website owners to instruct Apple not to use their data. In a recent report, Wired lists several major companies that have been left out of the training. These include The New York Times, Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, Financial Times, The Atlantic, USE Today, and Conde Nast.
According to Wired, two major studies have shown that about 6-7% of high-traffic websites block Applebot, proving that companies either don’t mind Apple’s training or aren’t aware of the option to reject it. Interestingly, another analysis by journalist Ben Welsh found that about a quarter of websites block Apple, compared to 53% of companies blocking Open AI’s bot, and Google AI’s Google Extended is blocked by about 43%.
Companies crawling websites for AI training have been a point of contention lately. Apple was accused of using stolen YouTube subtitles to train its AI. However, Apple has clarified that any data taken from the stack, the name of the data collected, was not used to train Apple’s intelligence. It was also recently revealed that Apple originally trained its AI on Google hardware, as detailed in a recent research report.
AI is currently growing rapidly, and the way companies collect their data is under scrutiny. Apple and other companies offer companies a way out, especially since certain websites contain profiles and images of the public.
For more information on Apple Intelligence and its features, check out our full breakdown of Apple’s WWDC presentation.
