Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon recap the Apple TV and entertainment announcements at WWDC – including tvOS 18, visionOS 2, Immersive Video updates, and more – and score their event predictions.
We’re back! After surviving our first challenge together, the gang is back for more with new goodies, an unexpectedly heavy topic, and a new mysterious challenge we didn’t see coming.
This week, John is joined by Jonathan Reed and Sigmund Judge for an explanation of how John missed his first episode of AppStories in seven years this week, an update from Sigmund on what’s coming to tvOS and Apple TV+, plus a bunch of picks from everyone.
Dan Moren has an excellent guide on Six Colors that explains how to exclude your website from the web crawlers used by Apple, OpenAI, and others to train large language models for their AI products. For many sites, the process simply requires a few edits to the robots.txt file on your server:
If you’re not familiar with robots.txt, it’s a text file placed at the root of a web server that can give instructions about how automated web crawlers are allowed to interact with your site. This system enables publishers to not only entirely block their sites from crawlers, but also specify just parts of the sites to allow or disallow.
The process is a little more complicated with something like a WordPress, which MacStories uses, and Dan covers that too.
Unfortunately, as Dan explains, editing robots.txt isn’t a solution for companies that ignore the file. It’s simply a convention that doesn’t carry any legal or regulatory weight. Nor does it help with Google or Microsoft’s use of your website’s copyrighted content unless you’re also willing to remove your site from the biggest search engines.
Although I’m glad there is a way to block at least some AI web crawlers prospectively, it’s cold comfort. We and many sites have years of articles that have already been crawled to train these models, and you can’t unring that bell. That said, MacStories’ robot.txt file has been updated to ban Apple and OpenAI’s crawlers, and we’re investigating additional server-level protections.
If you listen to Ruminate or follow my writing on MacStories, you know that I think what these companies are doing is wrong both in the moral and legal sense of the word. However, nothing captures it quite as well as this Mastodon post by Federico today:
If you’ve ever read the principles that guide us at MacStories, I’m sure Federico’s post came as no surprise. We care deeply about the Open Web, but ‘open’ doesn’t give tech companies free rein to appropriate our work to build their products.
Yesterday, Federico linked to Apple’s Machine Learning Research website where it was disclosed that the company has indexed the web to train its model without the consent of publishers. I was as disappointed in Apple as Federico. I also immediately thought of this 2010 clip of Steve Jobs near the end of his life, reflecting on what ‘the intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts’ meant to Apple:
I’ve always loved that clip. It speaks to me as someone who loves technology and creates things for the web. In hindsight, I also think that Jobs was explaining what he hoped his legacy would be. It’s ironic that he spoke about ‘technology married with Liberal Arts,’ which superficially sounds like what Apple and others have done to create their AI models but couldn’t be further from what he meant. It’s hard to watch that clip now and not wonder if Apple has lost sight of what guided it in 2010.
Apple’s announcement of “dark mode” icons has me thinking about how I would approach adapting “light mode” icons for dark mode. I grabbed 12 icons we made at Parakeet for our clients to illustrate some ways of going about it.
Before that though, let’s take some inventory. Of the 28 icons in Apple’s preview image of this feature, only nine have white backgrounds in light mode. However, all icons in dark mode have black backgrounds.
Actually, it’s worth noting that five “light mode” icons have black backgrounds, which Apple slightly adjusted to have a consistent subtle black gradient found on all of their new dark mode icons. Four of these—Stocks, Wallet, TV, and Watch—all seem to be the same in both modes. However, no other (visible) icons are.
Fantastic showcase by Louie Mantia of how designers should approach the creation of dark mode Home Screen icons in iOS 18. In all the examples, I prefer Mantia’s take to the standard black background version.
Our foundation models are trained on Apple’s AXLearn framework, an open-source project we released in 2023. It builds on top of JAX and XLA, and allows us to train the models with high efficiency and scalability on various training hardware and cloud platforms, including TPUs and both cloud and on-premise GPUs. We used a combination of data parallelism, tensor parallelism, sequence parallelism, and Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) to scale training along multiple dimensions such as data, model, and sequence length.
We train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web-crawler, AppleBot. Web publishers have the option to opt out of the use of their web content for Apple Intelligence training with a data usage control.
We never use our users’ private personal data or user interactions when training our foundation models, and we apply filters to remove personally identifiable information like social security and credit card numbers that are publicly available on the Internet. We also filter profanity and other low-quality content to prevent its inclusion in the training corpus. In addition to filtering, we perform data extraction, deduplication, and the application of a model-based classifier to identify high quality documents.
It’s a very technical read, but it shows how Apple approached building AI features in their products and how their on-device and server models compare to others in the industry (on servers, Apple claims their model is essentially neck and neck with GPT-4-Turbo, OpenAI’s older model).
This blog post, however, pretty much parallels my reaction to the WWDC keynote. Everything was fun and cool until they showed generative image creation that spits out slop “resembling” (strong word) other people; and in this post, everything was cool until they mentioned how – surprise! – Applebot had already indexed web content to train their model without publishers’ consent, who can only opt out now. (This was also confirmed by Apple executives elsewhere.)
As a creator and website owner, I guess that these things will never sit right with me. Why should we accept that certain data sets require a licensing fee but anything that is found “on the open web” can be mindlessly scraped, parsed, and regurgitated by an AI? Web publishers (and especially indie web publishers these days, who cannot afford lawsuits or hiring law firms to strike expensive deals) deserve better.
It’s disappointing to see Apple muddy an otherwise compelling set of features (some of which I really want to try) with practices that are no better than the rest of the industry.
How long until this become the ‘Apple Intelligence Research’ website? ↩︎
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
For the latest WWDC episode of AppStories, Federico is joined by Myke Hurley to talk about the Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence before John pops up with some AI tidbits and a WWDC vibe check from in and around Apple Park.
For this special episode of AppStories, Federico is joined by Jonathan and Niléane live in the Club MacStories+ Discord community to share their first impressions of the WWDC 2024 Keynote.
This episode is sponsored by:
Kolide – It ensures that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps. It’s Device Trust for Okta. Watch the demo now.
Recorded live in the Club MacStories Discord, Federico share their final preparations and plans for WWDC 2024 along with some last-minute predictions.
On AppStories+, Federico reveals his trio of iPad Pros and we take questions from Club members about WWDC.
This episode is sponsored by:
CleanMyMac X: Your Mac. As good as new. Get 15% off today with code APPSTORIES15.
- Kolide – It ensures that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps. It’s Device Trust for Okta. Watch the demo now.
This week, new MacStories podcasts, the Ruminate intro song is back, snack news, some keyboard accessories, and an alternative to the small web.
In what has become a yearly WWDC tradition, Apple executives have been out talking about the big announcements from this year’s conference. Craig Federighi, Greg Joswiak, John Giannandrea, and Tim Cook have given interviews to YouTubers, news sites, and John Gruber on a special edition of The Talk Show streamed live in spatial video.
They gave fascinating answers to some questions, particularly about Apple Intelligence, so without further ado, here’s a roundup of interesting Apple executive interviews over the past few days.
In a perfect world, end users would only work on managed devices with IT-approved apps. But every day, employees use personal devices and unapproved apps that aren’t protected by MDM, IAM, or any other security tool.
There’s a giant gap between the security tools we have and the way we actually work. 1Password calls it the Access-Trust Gap, and they’ve also created the first ever solution to fill it.
1Password Extended Access Management secures every sign-in for every app on every device. It includes the password manager you know and love, and the device trust solution you’ve probably heard of on this podcast, back when it was called Kolide.
1Password Extended Access Management cares about user experience and privacy, which means it can go places other tools can’t–like personal and contractor devices. It ensures that every device is known and healthy, and every login is protected. So stop trying to ban BYOD or Shadow IT, and start protecting them with 1Password Extended Access Management.
Yesterday, during its WWDC 2024 opening keynote, Apple officially revealed its latest software story for Apple TV. Coming this fall, tvOS 18 introduces new intelligence-based features such as InSight and on-device Siri, native 21:9 aspect ratio support, new screen savers, and a host of noteworthy additions to enhance the at-home TV viewing experience. Let’s jump into everything new coming to Apple TV.
InSight
Apple’s video player is somewhat of a hidden gem when it comes to playback and controls for audio and captions. A few years ago, the company expanded its functionality with a quick swipe down gesture revealing an Info panel with details of the currently-playing content and quick access to the user’s Up Next queue. Premiering this fall is a new feature nestled between those two elements called InSight.
A new addition to Apple TV+, InSight gives users real-time access to information about the actors and their characters onscreen, as well as the soundtrack in a given scene, allowing viewers to quickly add that song or musical performance to an Apple Music playlist to enjoy later. Much like Amazon Prime Video’s X-Ray feature that came before it, there’s lots of fine granular detail that could be added to InSight before its fall launch, but this is a great start.
In addition to accessing InSight on the big screen, users will also be able to view real-time actor, character, and music information through the Remote app found in Control Center on iOS and iPadOS, allowing access to the same information for a distraction-free experience when watching with friends and family.
Alongside updates to Apple’s platforms and Apple Intelligence, the company announced an assortment of new features coming to its line of services this fall. From the press release in Apple Newsroom:
“So many of our users rely on Apple services throughout their day, from navigating their commute with Apple Maps, to making easy and secure payments with Apple Pay, to curating playlists with Apple Music,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services. “We’re excited to give them even more to love about our services, like the ability to explore national parks with hikes in Apple Maps, redeem rewards or access installments with Apple Pay, and enjoy music with loved ones through SharePlay in Apple Music.”
I like that this services roundup is becoming an annual WWDC tradition. Some of these features were mentioned or shown on-screen during the keynote, but it’s easy for them to get overlooked in light of major operating system changes. While they might seem small in comparison, improvements to Apple’s services can have lasting day-to-day impacts on those who use them, myself included.
A few of my favorite services updates this year:
A new Places Library in Maps that allows you to save locations and write notes about them.
Tap to Provision, an easier way to add credit and debits cards to Wallet by tapping them instead of entering card numbers.
Redesigned event tickets in Wallet that can feature new types of data, including parking and weather information.
The Library tab in Apple Fitness+ for quicker access to saved workouts, Custom Plans, and Stacks.
Redesigned iCloud settings to better surface recommendations and features you’re using.
Check out the press release for all the updates coming to Apple’s services this fall. There’s a lot to look forward to there, and I’m happy to see the company continuing to push its services forward.
