Less than three months after Apple quietly debuted a tool for publishers to opt out of its AI training, a number of prominent news outlets and social platforms have taken the company up on it.
WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, the USA Today network, and WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, are among the many organizations opting to exclude their data from Apple’s AI training. The cold reception reflects a significant shift in both the perception and use of the robotic crawlers that have trawled the web for decades. Now that these bots play a key role in collecting AI training data, they’ve become a conflict zone over intellectual property and the future of the web.
I began to suspect that Apple had given me a refurbished iPhone as a replacement, and the previous owner had been banned for violating Snapchat’s guidelines. Searching the web led me to various forum posts from people who had been banned for posting pictures of illegal drugs, and contacting Snapchat support led to automated messages saying I was banned for violating guidelines and they cannot lift device bans.
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My takeaway from this process is a PSA to all app developers: Do not use DeviceCheck for anything other than verifying that a request is coming from an official Apple device. There is no reliable way to determine if the same person is still using the phone.
Even though Apple’s support pages are technically service-agnostic in their description, currently the only service that Apple Music supports transfers with is YouTube Music.
Apple device management vendor Addigy has announced the immediate availability of new Apple Intelligence controls. These controls, now live within Addigy’s platform, allow IT administrators and Managed Service Providers to test the activation and deactivation of Apple Intelligence across their devices ahead of its integration into the public fall OS releases.
Major technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Discord, have been enabling people to quickly sign up to harmful “undress” websites, which use AI to remove clothes from real photos to make victims appear to be “nude” without their consent. More than a dozen of these deepfake websites have been using login buttons from the tech companies for months.
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“What is concerning is that these are the most basic of security steps and moderation that are missing or not being enforced,” McGlynn says of the sign-in systems being used, adding that it is “wholly inadequate” for companies to react when journalists or campaigners highlight how their rules are being easily dodged. “It is evident that they simply do not care, despite their rhetoric,” McGlynn says. “Otherwise they would have taken these most simple steps to reduce access.”
My disappointment stems from the fact that Apple is better positioned and equipped than anyone else in the industry to take on Amazon head-to-head in ebooks. But doing so would require the company to do something different. And I don’t mean its misguided attempts to reinvent the reading experience as it’s tried in the past—most avid readers are pretty happy with their the way they consume books.
Pay me, if you want my data to train your AI: I think we are settling to this business model for everyone. Unless if this is a bubble, and the bubble bursts.
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Thanks for reading.