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Later this year, millions of Apple devices will begin running Apple Intelligence<\/a>, Cupertino’s take on generative AI that, among other things, lets people create images from text prompts. But some members of the creative community are unhappy about what they say is the company\u2019s lack of transparency around the raw information powering the AI model that makes this possible.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish Apple would have explained to the public in a more transparent way how they collected their training data,\u201d Jon Lam, a video games artist and a creators\u2019 rights activist based in Vancouver, told Engadget. \u201cI think their announcement could not have come at a worse time.\u201d<\/p>\n Creatives have historically been some of the most loyal customers of Apple, a company whose founder famously positioned it at the \u201cintersection of technology and liberal arts<\/a>.\u201d But photographers, concept artists and sculptors who spoke to Engadget said that they were frustrated about Apple\u2019s relative silence around how it gathers data for its AI models.<\/p>\n Generative AI is only as good as the data its models are trained on. To that end, most companies have ingested just about anything they could find on the internet, consent or compensation be damned. Nearly 6 billion images used to train multiple AI models also came from LAION-5B, a dataset of images scraped off the internet. In an interview<\/a> with Forbes<\/em>, David Holz, the CEO Midjourney, said that the company\u2019s models were trained on \u201cjust a big scrape of the internet\u201d and that \u201cthere isn\u2019t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they\u2019re coming from.\u201d<\/p>\n Artists, authors and musicians have accused generative AI companies of sucking up their work for free and profiting off of it, leading to more than a dozen lawsuits<\/a> in 2023 alone. Last month, major music labels including Universal and Sony sued<\/a> AI music generators Suno and Udio, startups valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, for copyright infringement. Tech companies have \u2013 ironically \u2013 both defended<\/a> their actions and also struck licensing deals<\/a> with content providers, including news publishers.<\/p>\n Some creatives thought that Apple might do better. \u201cThat\u2019s why I wanted to give them a slight benefit of the doubt,\u201d said Lam. \u201cI thought they would approach the ethics conversation differently.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, Apple has revealed very little about the source of training data for Apple Intelligence. In a post<\/a> published on the company\u2019s machine learning research blog, the company wrote that, just like other generative AI companies, it grabs public data from the open web using AppleBot, its purpose-made web crawler, something that its executives have also said<\/a> on stage. Apple\u2019s AI and machine learning head John Giannandrea also reportedly said<\/a> that \u201ca large amount of training data was actually created by Apple\u201d but did not go into specifics. And Apple has also reportedly signed deals with Shutterstock<\/a> and Photobucket<\/a> to license training images, but hasn\u2019t publicly confirmed those relationships. While Apple Intelligence tries to win kudos for a supposedly more privacy-focused approach using on-device processing<\/a> and bespoke cloud computing, the fundamentals girding its AI model appear little different from competitors.<\/p>\n Apple did not respond to specific questions from Engadget.<\/p>\n In May, Andrew Leung, a Los Angeles-based artist who has worked on films like Black Panther<\/em>, The Lion King<\/em> and Mulan<\/em>, called generative AI \u201cthe greatest heist in the history of human intellect\u201d in his testimony<\/a> before the California State Assembly about the effects of AI on the entertainment industry. \u201cI want to point out that when they use the term \u2018publicly available\u2019 it just doesn\u2019t pass muster,\u201d Leung said in an interview. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t automatically translate to fair use.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s also problematic for companies like Apple, said Leung, to only offer an option for people to opt out once they\u2019ve already trained AI models on data that they did not consent to. \u201cWe never asked to be a part of it.\u201d Apple does allow<\/a> websites to opt out of being scraped by AppleBot forApple Intelligence training data \u2013 the company says it respects robots.txt, a text file that any website can host to tell crawlers to stay away \u2013 but this would be triage at best. It’s not clear when AppleBot began scraping the web or how anyone could have opted out before then. And, technologically, it’s an open question how<\/a> or if<\/a> requests to remove information from generative models can even be honored.<\/p>\n This is a sentiment that even blogs aimed at Apple fanatics are echoing. \u201cIt\u2019s disappointing to see Apple muddy an otherwise compelling set of features (some of which I really want to try) with practices that are no better than the rest of the industry,\u201d wrote<\/a> Federico Viticci, founder and editor-in-chief of Apple enthusiast blog MacStories<\/em>.<\/p>\n Adam Beane, a Los Angeles-based sculptor who created a likeness of Steve Jobs for Esquire<\/em> in 2011, has used Apple products exclusively for 25 years. But he said that the company\u2019s unwillingness to be forthright with the source of Apple Intelligence training data has disillusioned him.<\/p>\n “I’m increasingly angry with Apple,” he told Engadget. “You have to be informed enough and savvy enough to know how to opt out of training Apple’s AI, and then you have to trust a corporation to honor your wishes. Plus, all I can see being offered as an option to opt out is further<\/em> training their AI with your data.”<\/p>\n Karla Ortiz, a San Francisco-based illustrator, is one of the plaintiffs in a 2023 lawsuit<\/a> against Stability AI and DeviantArt, the companies behind image generation models Stable Diffusion and DreamUp respectively, and Midjourney. \u201cThe bottom line is, we know [that] for generative AI to function as is, [it] relies on massive overreach and violations of rights, private and intellectual,\u201d she wrote<\/a> on a viral X thread about Apple Intelligence. \u201cThis is true for all [generative] AI companies, and as Apple pushes this tech down our throats, it\u2019s important to remember they are not an exception.\u201d<\/p>\n The outrage against Apple is also a part of a larger sense of betrayal among creative professionals against tech companies whose tools they depend on to do their jobs. In April, a Bloomberg<\/em> report<\/a> revealed that Adobe, which makes Photoshop and multiple other apps used by artists, designers, and photographers, used questionably-sourced images to train Firefly, its own image-generation model that Adobe claimed was \u201cethically\u201d trained. And earlier this month, the company was forced to update<\/a> its terms of service to clarify that it wouldn\u2019t use the content of its customers to train generative AI models after customer outrage. \u201cThe entire creative community has been betrayed by every single software company we ever trusted,\u201d said Lam. It isn\u2019t feasible for him to switch away from Apple products entirely, he\u2019s trying to cut back \u2014 he\u2019s planning to give up his iPhone for a Light Phone III<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there is a growing feeling that Apple is becoming just like the rest of them,\u201d said Beane. \u201cA giant corporation that is prioritizing their bottom line over the lives of the people who use their product.\u201d<\/p>\n This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n