Apple wants to conquer the Artificial Intelligence terrain without breaking the main principle of the company: user privacy. While other companies collect personal data massively to train their language models, Apple offers a radically different approach. Apple uses the users data to train Artificial Intelligence but in quite a unique way to improve Machine Learning.
According to a prestigious technology blog, Apple trains its Artificial Intelligence without accessing sensitive information of the users. It employs differential privacy techniques as well as other methods. It still improves the smart writing features and the summary capabilities, but without accessing personal information.
How does Apple train its Artificial Intelligence
It’s a difficult challenge, but Apple developed a way to train Artificial Intelligence without the individual identification of any data. It doesn’t use chats or e-mails information, so it doesn’t interfere with privacy issues. It’s a very careful and sophisticated method for a certain group of users.
Those who enable the Device analysis feature will receive fictional e-mails regarding common topics. For example, an invitation for a soccer match. The embeddings of those mails allow Apple to compare the language with user real texts and choose the most similar ones. The information never leaves the local storage and Apple doesn’t use the information at all.
The key feature is that the selection of the most similar mail is done in the same device. Apple never sees the real content. Thanks to differential privacy there’s a random content generation in order to protect personal data. Apple can identify which synthetic mails have been selected the most and then deduce which expression is most common. Even without reading any message of the users at all.
Apple is always thinking about the user
Apple uses the data to train language models that improve different Artificial Intelligence features such as mail summary, automatic writing and smart answers. All this training without compromising user privacy not even once. The collected data is not synched with any device, account or IP. The Genmoji works similarly. Apple only analyzes patterns used by hundreds of people and the applications are unique and unidentifiable.
Apple keeps the privacy promise and applies a technical sophistication level that may be the future for the sector. It’s an ethical way to train artificial intelligence. The company confirmed that the differential privacy techniques will also apply to other tools such as Image Playground, Memory creation, Writing tools and Visual Intelligence. The user has to enable share device analysis feature in order to help Apple training method. But you can also choose to disable the feature from the Privacy settings in your iPhone.