Apple Seeks News Publisher Deals for AI Training Amid AI Technology Push

Apple has approached a number of prominent publishers in an attempt to strike arrangements that would allow the Cupertino corporation to train generative artificial intelligence systems on news content.

Apple Wishes To Collaborate With Major Publishers To Train AI

Apple is looking for long-term contracts and has approached Condé Nast, NBC News, and IAC. Condé Nast publications include Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair, Ars Technica, Glamour, The New Yorker, GQ, and others, whereas IAC owns People, The Spruce, Serious Eats, Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, Entertainment Weekly, and Better Homes & Gardens, among others, as per The New York Times.

Proposed arrangements are worth at least $50 million and would allow Apple to license news article archives. The New York Times said that several publishers were "lukewarm" about Apple's offer. Apple's criteria are reported to be "overly broad," and the company has been coy about how it will use generative AI in journalism.

Other publishers were "optimistic" about a possible collaboration, and were delighted that Apple requested permission to use their content rather than simply training generative models on published news without permission, as other AI companies have done.

According to multiple sources, Apple is working hard to catch up to its competitors in generative AI products, with the company testing an "AppleGPT" chatbot internally and planning new AI features for iOS 18.

Privacy-Centric Generative AI Development with News Publisher Data

Microsoft, Google, and Meta have all introduced generative AI into their products during the last year, indicating that Apple is falling behind in terms of AI technology. ChatGPT, OpenAI's most popular chatbot, was trained on a massive quantity of data that included books, journals, and web pages, MacRumors reported.

ChatGPT has been attacked for the authenticity of the information that it occasionally surfaces, in addition to the copyright difficulties that come with broad scraping of online content. Apple may be able to produce a more trustworthy product by training an AI model on a more specialized set of data.

Apple is also thought to be planning to integrate generative AI features across its app offerings, so model-fed content from news sources may be added to Apple News. According to the New York Times, Apple officials have been "debating" how to obtain the data required for generative AI products. Because Apple does not wish to source content from the internet due to its emphasis on privacy, agreements with news publishers provide an option.

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