Apple has reached out to several major publishers about striking deals that would allow the Cupertino company to train an artificial intelligence generation system based on news content, The New York Times reported. Apple is aiming for a multi-year deal and has reached out to Condé Nast, NBC News and IAC.
Condé Nast's publications include Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair, Ars Technica, Glamor, The New Yorker, GQ and others, while IAC owns publications such as People, The Spruce, Serious Eats, Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, Entertainment Weekly and Better Homes & Gardens.
The proposed deal, worth at least $50 million, would see Apple license an archive of news articles. According to the New York Times, some publishers have "coldly responded" to Apple's proposal. Apple's terms are said to be "overbroad" and Apple has been vague about how it will apply generative AI to news.
Other publishers expressed "optimism" about potential partnerships and were pleased that Apple would require the use of their content rather than training generative models on published news without permission, as other AI companies do.
Multiple rumors indicate that Apple is working overtime to catch up with its competitors in artificial intelligence-generated products. Apple has internally tested an "AppleGPT" chatbot and plans to add new artificial intelligence features to iOS18.
Last year, Microsoft, Google and Meta all incorporated generative AI into their products, meaning Apple has fallen behind in AI technology. ChatGPT, OpenAI’s most popular chatbot, was trained on large amounts of data, including books, articles, and web pages.
In addition to the copyright issues that come with its extensive scraping of Internet content, ChatGPT has sometimes been criticized for the accuracy of the information it displays. By training its AI models on a more targeted set of information, Apple may ultimately be able to launch more reliable products. Apple is also said to be planning to add AI-generated functionality to its apps, so a model that pulls content from news sources might be added to Apple News.
The New York Times stated that Apple executives have been "debating" how to obtain the data needed for generative artificial intelligence products. Apple has not wanted to scrape information from the internet because of its special focus on privacy, so deals with news publishers offer an alternative.