Apple, one of the leading names in the consumer goods segment, is stepping up its AI game, but with a twist. Instead of mining user data directly, the company is adopting a privacy-focused method known as “differential privacy” to improve Apple Intelligence features such as text generation, Genmoji, and other creative tools.
Apple’s Privacy-First AI Strategy
In a blog post on its Machine Learning Research portal, Apple revealed how it plans to improve its underwhelming AI tools using ethical, privacy-conscious techniques. The key idea? Learning from user behaviour patterns without collecting any personally identifiable information.
Apple admits that its generative AI models have largely been trained on synthetic data, which often lacks the human-like quality in responses. This results in what some call “AI slop”—robotic or generic outputs. To counter this, Apple now wants to learn from real-world user interactions, while keeping personal data safe.
What is differential privacy?
Differential privacy allows Apple to extract broad usage trends without ever identifying individual users. Only those who opt-in for Device Analytics will contribute to the data pool. The company ensures that rare or unique inputs are never exposed, and no prompt or email can be linked back to a specific user.
For example, Apple will look at popular Genmoji prompts and patterns to understand what kind of emoji content users enjoy most—without knowing exactly what each person typed.
Improving text generation without reading your emails
Apple is also applying this privacy-first model to email writing tools. It created synthetic versions of common emails, turned them into data formats called embeddings, and then compared them to anonymised user email trends.
By doing this, Apple can understand what kind of writing styles users prefer—without ever reading the actual content of emails. This method is currently being used to improve email drafting and summaries, and Apple plans to expand it to other writing tools shortly.
What’s next for Apple Intelligence?
Apple aims to use this technique across multiple features in future updates, including:
- Image Playground
- Image Wand
- Memories Creation
- Writing Tools
- Visual Intelligence
By relying on differential privacy, Apple is attempting to balance innovation in AI with its long-standing reputation for user privacy.