User alleges Gemini AI scanning Google Drive hosted PDF files without explicit permission — Google says otherwise
www.tomshardware.com
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Kevin Bankston, a Senior Advisor on AI Governance, discusses this concerning Google Gemini behavior.

This is why anything you upload to the cloud should be encrypted. Or just, yenno, don’t use the cloud

“Caught”

Google told me they really care about my privacy, tho.

this reminded me of the Google takeout I requested last week so I could switch to self hosting 👍

Oh silly mistake.

Laughing all the way to the bank.

*shocked pikachu*

…Why would you post unencrypted personal information onto the cloud in the first place?

!RemindMe in two hours to give my doctor my new SSN after my last one got stolen: 644-11-9217

There’s a certain level of due-diligence that you can use when you’re moving personal information around on the cloud. Hospitals have a legal obligation to keep your medical records secure; Google does not.

Yes, I wanted to one-up your disbelief by pretending I use random text boxes to store personal information.

Maybe one of these days I’ll make a joke that’s funny instead of confusing…

If it makes you feel better, I’m mildly autistic, so I tend to see things a bit more literally than most.

This whole exchange made me feel better. Thank you for being you

Hot Potato
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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)

sunzu
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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?

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

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

To make a good model you need two things:

  1. Clean data that is tagged in a way that allows you to grade model performance
  2. 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.

sunzu
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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?

They have two avenues to make money:

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

Probably market dominance

The Doctor
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Surprising nobody.

What do you mean “caught”? Google Drive has always been a data farm.

Yes. Now its documented that Google is violating their terms of service. I’m sure their lawyers will point to the clause that says they can change the terms of service at any time without warning

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