Big Websites Opt Out Of Apple Intelligence Training

Multiple publishers, media organizations, and social media networks have requested to be excluded from Apple’s AI training program for Apple Intelligence, Applebot-Extended, which the company launched a few months ago.

According to Wired, big websites and organizations like The New York Times, Instagram, Facebook, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Condé Nast, and Vox Media, have confirmed to refuse access to their content.

Apple launched Applebot in 2015, a web crawler—an automated program to browse content and analyze data—to train its assistant Siri and its search feature Spotlight. The new extension, Applebot-Extended, launched in June is being used to train the company’s AI products.

“With Applebot-Extended, web publishers can choose to opt out of their website content being used to train Apple’s foundation models powering generative AI features across Apple products, including Apple Intelligence, Services, and Developer Tools,” states the document shared by Apple in June, where it also adds the code to disallow Applebot-Extended.

Multiple websites have opted out in an attempt to protect their data and intellectual property, but, since it’s a new web crawler, not too many websites have done this yet.

The Canadian startup Originality AI analyzed traffic from 1,000 websites with high traffic and only 7% were blocking the bot. Google and OpenAI have also launched new web crawlers to train their AI products. According to data journalist Ben Welsh, 53% of the news websites they recently analyzed block OpenAI’s bot, which launched in September last year. Welsh told Wired that the number of websites blocking these web crawlers to train AI has been gradually increasing.

As a strategy to reach agreements regarding data protection and copyright with the major publications in the market, OpenAI has been negotiating new deals. The company recently announced new partnerships with large media companies like Condé Nast, TIME, and News Corp.