Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI (article from 3.07.2023)
Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI (article from 3.07.2023)
An update to Google's privacy policy suggests that the entire public internet is fair game for it's AI projects. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.
Article: https://gizmodo.com/google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486
Article summarizing the article above: https://gizmodo.com/google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486
Copy of the summarization:
Google has updated its privacy policy to explicitly state it can use virtually anything you post online to enhance its AI tools, a change that raises intriguing privacy questions and has prompted reactions from platforms such as Twitter and Reddit.
Google's New Privacy Policy: Google has altered its privacy policy to state that it can scrape almost any content posted online for the advancement of its AI tools.
· It uses this data to improve existing services and develop new products, features, and technologies.
· The data harvested aids in training Google's AI models and building products like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI.
Impact on Internet Users: This policy modification challenges conventional concepts of online privacy.
· It suggests that any public post on the internet could be used by Google
· This practice necessitates a shift in how we perceive online activity, focusing on how the information could be employed rather than who can see it.
Legal and Copyright Concerns: The usage of data from the internet to fuel AI systems raises legal and copyright issues.
· It remains uncertain whether such a practice is legal, with courts likely to address these new copyright issues in the coming years.
· This practice affects consumers in surprising ways, raising questions about data ownership.
Reactions from Other Platforms: Twitter and Reddit have responded to this AI-related issue by restricting access to their APIs.
· This action aimed to protect their intellectual property from data scraping but resulted in breaking third-party tools used to access these platforms.
· Controversies have ensued, such as Twitter contemplating charging public entities for tweets, and Reddit seeing a mass protest due to API changes disrupting the work of moderators.
Elon Musk's Stance on Web Scraping: Elon Musk has recently expressed concerns about web scraping.
· He blamed several Twitter mishaps on the company's need to prevent others from data extraction.
· Despite these claims, most IT experts believe these problems are likely due to management issues or technical difficulties.
I don't know why we should be surprised. This is just natural progression and even if they don't explicitly send it out to a specific location on its own eventually it will find and consume the information in one way or another unless it is kept in an isolated box. There is absolutely no legislation that will fix/stop this unless 100% of all people capable of creating these will respect such a decision and being the odd groups out will severely hamper their future.
Suppose there is legislation in the future; should it opt-in only or opt-out?
I think you'd have two very different data sets to train on there. Im not sure opt-out is better than no choice. These AI models are going to be out there doing things for us, i think we’re all better off if they have the highest quality of data to train on.
Opt out, we already have robots.txt for this and would work just as well as any legislation.
You will never be able to tell if bad actors are violating your ToS or the law unless they keep raw data stored for inspection.
Even if AIPrime respects your wishes and doesn't scrape your site I potentially have the ability to feed it anything I have access to. I won't claim to have the largest data library on earth but I have been data hoarding since the mid 90s and would gladly share it with a company I feel is aligned with my beliefs.
Rather than it being surprising it's just a post about their official statement on their position with this stuff where they say that they WILL do those things which is interesting.