Apple’s Going to Take a Peek at Your On-Device Data to Improve Its AI

How do you improve your AI without scraping tons of personal data? Apple’s approach, at least for text generation, is using a combination of “synthetic data” and on-device messages.

To get access to those on-device messages, however, Apple needs permission, so it will use data from those who have opted in to Device Analytics to cross-check the accuracy of its synthetic data, without collecting any actual emails or text from iPhone owners.

“Synthetic data are created to mimic the format and important properties of user data, but do not contain any actual user generated content,” Apple says in a post on its Machine Learning Research site. Translation: Apple Intelligence makes up a bunch of emails.

That works well enough on one specific topic. But “to improve our models we need to generate a set of many emails that cover topics that are most common in messages.” Those fake messages are then checked against actual emails on someone’s device to pull out the synthetic data that is most like something a human would write.

“This process allows us to improve the topics and language of our synthetic emails, which helps us train our models to create better text outputs in features like email summaries, while protecting privacy,” Apple says.

According to Bloomberg, Apple will roll this out in an upcoming beta version of iOS and iPadOS 18.5 and macOS 15.5. You can see what type of analytics data you’re sharing with Apple via Settings > Privacy & Security > Analytics & Improvements.

“Only users who have opted-in to send Device Analytics information to Apple participate. The contents of the sampled emails never leave the device and are never shared with Apple,” the company says.

The company is under pressure to improve its Apple Intelligence features, which thus far have largely focused on writing tools and image tricks like Genmoji and Image Playground. Siri got a small upgrade last fall, but a larger overhaul has been delayed a few times. The rumor mill is all over the place, with some saying we’ll get a glimpse of new Siri features in the fall and others saying we may have to wait until 2027. Apple’s been hit with multiple lawsuits over those delays.

About Jibin Joseph

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Jibin is a tech news writer based out of Ahmedabad, India. Previously, he served as the editor of iGeeksBlog and is a self-proclaimed tech enthusiast who loves breaking down complex information for a broader audience.

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