What is Apple’s AI doing with your data?

Apple Intelligence — the collective brand name for all of Apple’s own AI tools — is intended to be more of a personal assistant than anything else, with an emphasis on “personal.” It takes in specific information about your relationships and contacts, messages and emails you’ve sent, events you’ve been to, meetings on your calendar and other highly individualized bits of data about your life. And then it uses that data to, Apple hopes, make your life a little easier — helping you dig up a photo you took from that concert years ago, finding the right attachment to put on an email, or ranking your mobile notifications by priority and urgency. But while Apple Intelligence might know that you went on a hiking trip last year, it will lack what company executives called “world knowledge” — more general information about history, current events and other things that are less directly linked to you. That’s where ChatGPT comes in. Users will be able to have Siri forward questions and prompts to ChatGPT — on an opt-in basis — or have ChatGPT help you write documents within Apple apps. Apple said it plans to integrate with other third-party AI models eventually, too. The integration essentially removes a step to accessing ChatGPT and gives Apple users a more seamless onramp to that platform. Since Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT will be used for largely different purposes, the amount and type of information users send to each AI may be different, too. Apple Intelligence will have access to a wide range of your personal data, from your written communications to photos and videos you’ve taken to a record of your calendar events. There doesn’t seem to be a way to prevent Apple Intelligence from accessing this information, short of not using its features; an Apple spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to questions on that topic. ChatGPT won’t necessarily or automatically have access to your highly personal details, although you might choose to share some of this data and more with OpenAI if you decide to use ChatGPT through Apple. In Monday’s demo, Apple showed Siri asking the user for permission to send a prompt to ChatGPT before doing so. If it’s true that Apple can’t see the personal data that its large AI models are crunching — a claim Apple invited researchers to test for themselves because the system’s design is meant to be scrutinized — then that sets Apple’s implementation apart from that of other companies. For example, when you use ChatGPT, OpenAI discloses that it uses your data to further train its AI models. With Private Cloud Compute, you theoretically won’t have to take Apple’s word that it doesn’t use your data for AI training