Jan. 30, 2011 - According to the newly disclosed shareholder proposal, a number of shareholders have asked theappleThe company pressured it to disclose more of its AI Activity details to further improve training and reasoning Apple Intelligence (Apple Intelligence) Transparency.
The proposal, submitted by the National Law and Policy Center (NLPC), proposes to add a motion to the 2025 shareholder vote called "Ethics Report on Access to and Use of AI Data," which will be voted on at Apple's annual shareholders meeting on February 25th.
The proposal requires Apple to prepare a report assessing the risks to the company's operations, finances, and public health, safety, and well-being posed by the unethical or inappropriate use of external data in the course of the development and training of its AI programs, and is required to describe the steps Apple has taken to mitigate these risks and its methodology for evaluating their effectiveness.
In the document, the NLPC highlights public concerns about AI and data ethics, including the way data is accessed to train models, such as "data scraping, unauthorized collection, and unauthorized use of proprietary or copyrighted content."
In order to mitigate risk and "enhance shareholder value," the NLPC insisted that Apple further disclose its strategy for the ethical use of user data in AI development.1AI cites a blog post in which the NLPC argues that the report is intended to encourage Apple toTaking a more activePrivacyposition, which may provide the company with a strong competitive advantage.
NLPC notes that Apple was invited to join OpenAI's board of directors, but relinquished its seat "after antitrust concerns arose. Apple's association with OpenAI raises more questions in light of the company's alleged unethical data collection practices.
While the proposal is highly critical of Apple's AI efforts and its opaque policies, its impact is likely to be limited. In addition to accepting shareholder proposals, Apple will advise shareholders on how to vote. In this case, Apple may be advising shareholders to oppose the measure.
Nonetheless, the core elements of the proposal may still have an impact on Apple, prompting it to maintain as ethical an operation as possible. For example, while Apple prefers to process on-device and thus not feed back user data, it still relies on cloud servers to process certain queries.
In this case, Apple employs "private cloud computing" to maximize privacy, and through extensive use of encryption, Apple is unable to access user queries. Apple has also attempted to address the collection of copyrighted data by finding archives and requesting paid access.