Apple may be behind the times when it comes to generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard, but it seems determined to catch up as quickly as possible – and we just got a better idea of how exactly it will do that.
According to The New York TimesApple hopes to strike a deal with news publishers to gain access to their archives of content. AI models developed by Apple could then be trained on the vast amounts of written material in those archives.
The report says “multi-year deals” worth “at least $50 million” are on the table, although it sounds like none of the negotiations have been finalized yet. Apple, as you might expect, has declined to comment.
According to the NYT, heavyweight publishers involved in the talks include Condé Nast (responsible for outlets such as Vogue and The New Yorker), IAC (which runs People, The Daily Beast and Better Homes and Gardens) and NBC News.
Copy rights and wrongs
These deal rumors highlight a core part of how Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT's GPT-4 and Bard's Gemini work. They analyze enormous amounts of text in order to learn to produce convincing sentences themselves.
AI companies have been quite circumspect about where they get the data their models are trained on, but there's undoubtedly a massive web scraping operation involved somewhere. In other words, if you wrote something that's on the internet, it was probably used to help train an AI.
Companies like OpenAI have pledged to defend companies using AI models against copyright claims – a clear sign that these developers of artificial intelligence engines know they are not on the firmest ground when it comes to intellectual property issues .
To Apple's credit, the company is trying to compensate writers and publishers for the use of their articles, rather than taking the articles first and asking permission later. Expect to hear more from Apple about AI over the course of 2024.