Apple's Stand: Why ChatGPT-Powered App Gets Blocked

0:00Nash Falls is the relentless new thriller from number one New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci When mild-mannered business analyst Walter Nash is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network, his life is turned completely upside down. Publishers Weekly says, in Baldacci's long list of heroes, Walter Nash is among the most memorable. Experience the full cast audio production of Nash Falls, led by McLeod Andrews. Available from Hachette Audio wherever audiobooks are sold. Also available in hardcover and ebook. Today, Apple has blocked a popular email app that used ChatGPT technology inside of it from posting an update to their app.

0:40And this is something that has a lot of implications for the entire industry as a whole, especially considering the news of ChatGPT's API that came out yesterday. So today on the podcast, we're going to be diving into what this means exactly for the industry and what is going on in this particular case. So essentially what is happening is Apple, who if you aren't in software, what happens is every time you want to make an update to your app and every time you want to add new features, you have to resubmit it to Apple. They'll have a person manually review it, make sure you're following all of their protocol.

1:13And if everything looks good, they approve the app, goes live on the App Store. Now, recently there has been an app called BlueMail, which is not a new app, but it's an email app and they have integrated chat GPT technology to help people with writing their emails. And Apple has blocked BlueMail and they gave them a little blurb about why they blocked them. They said, your app includes AI generated content, but does not appear to include content filtering at this time. And essentially what they're saying is that they would like BlueMail to update their app and say that it's only for people that are 17 years and older because it could, you know, have content, like essentially they're saying that the AI built into this email thing could say things that are inappropriate, sexual, reference drugs, or other things like that.

2:05So it's pretty interesting. Of course, Volatch, who's the CEO of Blue Mail, is, you know, venomously denying that, you know, there's this issue. And furthermore, I think the point he makes is, you know, there's hundreds, maybe thousands of these apps that have integrated chat GPT. Personally, I created an app called self pause. It's an AI life coach, and we use chat GPT technology, mostly different APIs from open AI. But we have a whole bunch of these AI life coaches and these life AI chats that people can go on and talk about their problems and work through them, help set goals and whatnot. And so we're kind of like the first AI life coach, but we're doing the exact same thing.

2:47So the implications in this are pretty massive because if Apple's telling people that, you know, they have to shut their, if they have to put content warnings and put restrictions and stuff on their app, when all of this is just coming from open AI, it's pretty, it's a pretty big implication. Essentially, you know, no one under 17, assuming people put their correct age on their accounts, would be able to use chat GPT technology integrated into apps. And what's interesting is, you know, Blue Mail, it probably has like, it's not just an open pipe to ChatGPT. It's probably got like custom prompts and scripts and things written in there so that it's like harnessing the power of ChatGPT to be able to write different areas, write different things for your email probably helps auto-generate titles or subject lines, help auto-generate emails and whatnot.

3:35But it's not necessarily like pretty much what I'm envisioning this would look like. Like if I was using ChatGPT to write like an email helper, I would have a prompt in there. So on your email app, I would have a prompt in there that says, read the previous email. Based off of that, come up with a reply. And so it's not like this thing is just like an open fire hose to open AI and it's going to come up with something completely crazy or inappropriate. It's just going to be replying to people's stuff. So I think it's a little bit unfair of Apple and apparently they agree. there's thousands of chat gpt like apps that have been published and so um you know if they're trying to kind of curb innovation on this one it's going to affect everybody so it's going to be pretty interesting to to see what happens here i think that you know we've seen a lot of controversy around this area in general and open ai has actually to this point tried to you know um put a bunch of trust and safety features which also have their own controversy but they've been trying to put their own trusted safety features on there.

4:38So I think, you know, this thing isn't really built to say anything that's too off the rails that you would need those kind of, I guess, age restrictions on and whatnot. So it's going to be pretty interesting to see what happens there. At the moment, Blue Mail is fighting back and saying that they don't need, you know, this new restrictions. and they said that they've been able to update their Android Blue Mail app on Google Play on their app store. So, you know, this is completely fine on Google Play, which has, you know, also really strict rules for everything the same as Apple. And Apple, it's kind of interesting that it feels like they're kind of targeting this one specific company.

5:23And if you think that that is all the controversy around the story, I will bring up one other thing that is pretty interesting. apparently this is not blue males first run in uh with apple so in the past apple actually um went and removed blue male in 2019 when they had so essentially what apple did is they came up with this new thing you know everyone used to have this like sign in with google or sign in with facebook and apple wanted to be you know join the cool kid club and have a sign in with apple and you know they said it was for more security and safety and being anonymous because essentially if you sign in with Apple on apps, you can hide your email so the app doesn't know what your email is.

6:05And so anyways, Apple rolls this out and they, I guess, didn't implement it fast enough. And they actually went and removed BlueMail from its Mac app store. And, you know, they said it was due to security concerns or whatever. And, you know, then they went and they said that there was no security concerns. And so Apple eventually went and ended up approving the app many months later and putting it back on. But in my opinion, I almost wonder, you know, so actually that went to a lawsuit, they tried to sue Apple, and a federal judge dismissed the case saying that they didn't have enough evidence of Apple's monopoly power and anti competitive behavior.

6:46But it's kind of interesting because Apple has their own email app. And so this whole BlueMail thing, which essentially lets you put your email onto, you know, a different email app technically is directly competing against iOS's email app. So it's kind of interesting, you know, they tried doing the lawsuit, it didn't work. But I will say what is interesting is that the antitrust lawyer, Jonathan Cantor, who was hired by, you know, who was hired by the legal team at BlueMail, um he is he's a legal counsel in their antitrust case against apple and in 2021 that same lawyer took over as head of the antitrust division at the u.s justice department which is currently pursuing its own antitrust investigation into apple so i'm not sure exactly what's going to happen there it's pretty interesting obviously when you see these massive tech giants apple and google with essentially it's a duopoly uh over the app store um when someone comes and kind of threatens one of their in-house apps and it looks like they're retaliating, it's not a very good look.

7:48So it's going to be interesting to see what happens with Apple in this case, if they're able to, you know, kind of make these ChatGPT apps obey them pretty much. And if they're going to roll this out to all ChatGPT apps, like all apps that are using this technology, it is kind of interesting. They're specifically targeting an app that they previously have had a beef with. So that really doesn't look good as far as an antitrust and anti-competitive perspective, but it'll be interesting to see how this story rolls out in the future.