this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
104 points (99.1% liked)

Technology

163 readers
2 users here now

This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the latest developments, trends, and innovations in the world of technology. Whether you are a tech enthusiast, a developer, or simply curious about the latest gadgets and software, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and more. From the impact of technology on society to the ethical considerations of new technologies, this category covers a wide range of topics related to technology. Join the conversation and let's explore the ever-evolving world of technology together!

founded 2 years ago
 

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.

top 40 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yet they attempt to prevent any web-scraping of their services. Interesting.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

All for me and none for you

The classic motto of a company that's simply too big and is asking to be broken up.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I expect every AI company is doing that. At least Google is being honest about it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

That's the ugly truth. There's plenty of reasons to be upset with Google, but this ain't it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

𝕱𝖎𝖓𝖊! 𝓛𝓮𝓽'𝓼 🅂🄴🄴 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕞 ѕ¢яαρ 𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔰!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Oh, hey cool - look guys, more recaptcha fodder!!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Not sure how they can enforce their terms and conditions on me when I don’t use any of their services?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's not a TOC, you don't have to agree to it. They're just kind of telling you what they feel like they can get away with. I don't see anywhere in the new terms where they outright assert that they own it though, but they just kinda say "Yo, if we can see it, we're going to use it to train AI".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

That's what Google does with search and advertising, isn't it? They take everything they can see and use it to make money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

They don't need to enforce anything, you do. If you post anything onlline, they'll scrape it. If you have a problem with that, the onus is on you to enforce your copyright (if you have it)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

This has been discussed elsewhere, and by people smarter than I, but chat bots are going to start learning from other chat bots and it's going to be less and less reliable over time, no?

Like there is an internet BEFORE ChatGPT, which is about as reliable of data as one could hope to find, and then there is a post day one chatgpt, which the data is already getting polluted by random LLM gibberish. How is google's webscraping going to know if the data it is getting is legitimate human being thoughts, or just random madeup shit from a LLM?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There was an article recently about this (too lazy to search it). It's already starting to happen. If most of the content they train on is the internet and more internet content is created by LLMs without being tagged as AI generated content (can't be guaranteed by all actors), then it's inevitable. High signal training data is out the window.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

likely they would limit training data to only include pre-2020 or earlier to avoid this

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Then you run into the problem of having outdated information. As more AI generated content pollutes the internet and more time passes the problem will only become more severe.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There are experiments with feeding LLMs output of other LLMs and the results are awful. Seems for now they can only generate sensible text if fed human output.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Right, but if they are training all new AI on shit they find online, like this comment, wouldn't that pollute that dataset, considering I generated this comment with AI?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I can't tell if this is a joke or not lmao

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It was... perhaps?

[–] p03locke 1 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

considering I generated this comment with AI?

Woah

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Your comment seems too intelligent to be AI generated.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

But when the world needed them most the robots(.txt) were no where to be found

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's kind of you to assume that they respect those, lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Oh and they won't. We had a lengthy verification process where we proved we owned these sites we didn't want aggregated and they still refused to honor robots.txt.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

And yet somehow, they still have the shittiest AI this side of ChatGPT and Claude. (Source: tested PaLM 2 on Poe, and Bard). Checking out the fine tunings of Llama, it doesn't seem like more training is always better. You'll hit a wall. And even tuning seems to be an art at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Dang, remember when Google’s motto used to be “Don’t Be Evil”?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

They stopped to not being evil, that is...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There has always been a symbiotic relationship between search engines and content site owners. The deal being "l (site owner) will let you index my site to make it easy for people to find my content. In exchange, you (Google) can make money by building user profiles and selling targeted advertising." Conceptually this is no different, except that Google is now using the data to build new applications and businesses - AI rather than ads.

I believe that Google does respect robots.txt (though these need to be well specified and located), so it's relatively easy for site owners to opt out of being indexed. Whether being indexed should be on an opt-out basis (as opposed to opt-in basis) in the first place is perhaps the key question, one I'd argue should have been discussed 20, 30 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

or they could maliciously opt-in by including lots of hidden garbage text to poison the scrapers

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Cool. Cool, cool, cool

I'm applying the same principle to every corporately owned IP out there, too, then. If I can see it, it's mine.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't think they belong to the company any more than the words you read belong to you

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Exactly, this reads like hysteria. If you've placed your words on a public website, it's a shocked Pikachu moment when someone (or in the case of an AI-in-training something) reads those words. It's basic fair use.

If someone put up a billboard with some text on it and then got angry whenever someone else read it I would question their sanity. Even if that "someone" was the Google street view car.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, I don't really see the fuss about people's content being used to train AIs. It's not really any different from a human reading your content and using their brain to make something similar.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

There's a surprising number of people who seem to think LLMs contain a database of everything it's trained with, and that it just spits out snippets from there. There are also lots of very vocal artists against image generation models who claim that these 5-10 GB models contain all their copyrighted art, claiming that the models just create collages from existing images.

People simply don't understand how these things work.

[–] p03locke 1 points 2 years ago

Yep, this is pure clickbait, and AI is the next big thing to be fearmongering over.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

What a surprise

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

good, I'd like it if AI thinks a bit more like me and a bit less like the rest of the internet

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Does this include emails as well? If so, I guess I'll have to migrate over to another email service.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Gmail has scanned your emails, and those sent to you, since the day the service went live. It is part of the Ts and Cs.

load more comments
view more: next ›