Privacy

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Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive hosted PDF files without permission — user complains feature can't be disabled (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (7 children)

For the people who didn't read the article. Read this TLDR: When you open a Google Doc. A Gemini sidebar appears, so you can ask questions about the document. Here, it summarized a document without the user asking.

The article title makes it seem like they are using your files to train AI which no proof exists for that(yet)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Thank you for the service!

I see your point re training, but aint the entire point why they want peasants using their models is to train them more?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Generative AI doesn't get any training in use. The explosion in public AI offerings falls into three categories:

Saves the company labor by replacing support staff
Used to entice users by offering features competitors lack (or as catch-up after competitors have added it for this reason)
Because AI is the current hot thing that gets investors excited

To make a good model you need two things:

Clean data that is tagged in a way that allows you to grade model performance
Lots of it

User data might meet need 2, but it fails at need 1. Running random data through neural networks to make it more exploitable (more accurate interest extraction, etc) makes sense, but training on that data doesn't.

This is clearly demonstrated by Google's search AI, which learned lots of useful info from Reddit but also learned absurd lies with the same weight. Not just overtuned-for-confidence lies, straight up glue-the-cheese-on lies.

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

Thank you for explaining this.

Ok so what is ChatGPT angle here providing this services for "free"

What do they get out of it? or is this just a google play to get you in the door, then data mine?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Probably market dominance

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

They have two avenues to make money:

Sell commercial services such as customer support bots. They get customers thanks to the massive buzz their free services generated.
Milking investors, the real way to make money.

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