Faulty Apple Intelligence: comparison with iPhone data should help

In future, iPhone analysis data will be used in the further development of Apple Intelligence. In order to better understand how customers actually use the new AI functions, Apple wants to gain trends and insights from "real user data" in future. The company announced this in its machine learning blog. This should ultimately help to make Apple Intelligence more efficient. Apple emphasized that data protection techniques will be used to avoid capturing real emails, texts and entries. Insights into the behavior of individual users are therefore also excluded.

Differential privacy to protect user data

Apple continues to rely on "differential privacy". The mathematical process enables large data sets to be analyzed in order to identify patterns and trends without gaining specific insights into the input of individual users.

A nested process is used to improve the summary functions in Apple Mail, iMessage and the Messages app, for example: Apple uses a language model to generate synthetic or artificially created texts on common topics, such as a message like "Do you fancy playing tennis tomorrow at 11:30". Elements of such synthetic messages are then compared with real emails from users on their devices. The operating system then determines which synthetically generated message comes closest to an actual email from the user's inbox, as the company explains. Trends identified in this way should contribute to better training data to ultimately make the Apple language models more suitable for everyday use and provide more meaningful summaries.

For the AI-generated emojis ("Genmojis"), Apple also analyzes the commands or prompts that users use to create the picture characters. Differential privacy is also used here to prevent prompts from being traced back to individual users, as the company writes.

The functions are linked to analysis data that Apple's operating systems – here iOS, iPadOS and macOS – send to the manufacturer. Users are usually asked whether they want to send this data to Apple when setting up the device for the first time or after an update. According to Apple, the analysis of Genmoji prompts is already active in a beta. This probably refers to the current beta versions of iOS 18.5 and macOS 15.5, with email synchronization to follow soon. Other Apple Intelligence functions such as image generation with Playground, the writing tools, the creation of reviews in the Photos app and the "Visual Intelligence" function will also rely on this method in future, according to Apple.

Problems with Apple Intelligence

The summary of messages by Apple Intelligence in particular regularly causes problems. The company has even temporarily disabled the function for news apps after the Apple language models repeatedly provided incorrect information. The learning possibilities of Apple AI have been extremely limited to date, as many functions are executed purely locally on the devices and Apple's AI cloud is not supposed to store any data. Users only have the option of providing manual feedback and transmitting specific error data to Apple.

Apple has been using differential privacy for almost 10 years to analyze user data on a large scale but in a data-saving manner, for example to determine popular emojis or improve the word suggestions of the iOS keyboard. If you do not want to transfer analysis data to Apple, you should check in "Settings > Privacy & security > Analysis & improvements" whether "Share iPhone analysis" is activated – and then deactivate it.

(lbe)