This is the script of my national radio report yesterday discussing
the rumor that Google was using Gmail to train AI, and other issues
surrounding confusion about when and how AI is actually being used by
Big Tech.
- - -
So yes some rather viral stories started making the rounds claiming
that Google was already or soon would be training their AI on the
content of users' personal and/or business Gmail messages. And as you
might expect this triggered quite an outcry, and Google has now denied
that any of this is taking place. And I don't see any reason to doubt
that statement.
However, this does further open up the Pandora's Box of the
ever-growing generative AI train wreck that keeps accelerating with
little sense that the Big Tech AI firms are willing to take
responsibility for the problems that their Large Language Model
generative AI systems are causing.
And this is of particular importance now because there have been
reports that the administration was considering an executive order to
override state regulations on AI, even though Congress recently
overwhelmingly voted to give states the ability to do AI regulation.
Irrespective of the specifics of this particular Gmail story, the
reality is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to know or
understand if, when, or how one's documents and other communications,
whether business or personal may actually be ingested into AI, and
whether that ingestion is to a local on-device model or if your data
may find its way back into centralized models either purposely or
accidentally. Because we know there have been cases of such data that
individuals and businesses would consider private showing up in public
AI interactions.
One trend now that you may have noticed, is that some firms don't even
explicitly mention the term AI even though they are using AI-based
systems, perhaps in some cases because they know the term now
understandably triggers concerns and alarm from so many people. The
firms will push new features and options to supposedly make your life
better and sometimes the only place where you might see the term AI is
deep in their Terms of Service that hardly anybody reads and where
often even fewer people have the background to really understand them.
And it can be suspicious because it seems pretty obvious that those
features couldn't really be implemented without AI, whether or not
your data was actually being used for AI training today.
And these kinds of pushes for you to accept these services can come in
various forms. Sometimes it's just a button that you can easily
ignore. Sometimes it's what in Google-speak is called a
"Butter Bar" -- a banner across the top of the current page. And then there's
what many people consider to be the really nasty approach -- and many firms
use this for all kinds of reasons. And it's called a "modal pop-up" --
that's M-O-D-A-L, and that's when you get a box or new page blocking
some or all of your page that you're actually trying to use, and
you're often forced to make some sort of decision right then --
sometimes with the option to just close the pop-up and sometimes
not -- before you can continue work on your actual page.
Google used these fairly recently when they changed some available
interactions between services and their AI, and it was pretty in your
face -- it seemed that you had to decide right then what you were
going to want, whether you fully understood their explanations or not.
And frankly I didn't fully understand what they were saying until I
researched it in some depth.
Whether or not some firms are purposely trying to trick you into using
their AI even if they haven't defaulted you into it, it's clear that
absent strong regulations to help avoid AI abuses, much of Big Tech
intends to use AI to steamroll right over individual choices and
sometimes privacy as well, in their desperate quest to profit from the
staggering sums they're pouring into AI development, and how society
at large feels about this seems -- unfortunately for us -- often not
to be on Big Tech's list of concerns.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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