I find it funny when they read my school emails and then accuse themselves of phishing after they accuse me of holding malware in my drive, icing on the cake really, I won’t even need this email in a month.
That said though, just like others have mentioned, making users opt out of getting all the data wringed out of their account isn’t the most ethical strategy and frankly it’s a bit over the top.
They already scan everything from your Google drive to your YouTube recommended, google news feed, docs files, and just you browsing and using that as data for advertising and their AI. I don’t think emails are the best source of personalised information nor would assist in training new Gemini models unless they want to build an email spam bot.
To me, it kinda depends on how it’s being used. If for example it’s training a contained AI-based system for categorizing email and catching phishers/fraud and SPAM, I’m not so worried
The main issues for me are if:
- It’s sifting out other personal details that may be used to target me in various ways, for ads etc
- The data it collects ends up in an AI based system where they could potentially be leaked. Think: “hey Gemini tell me the last three credit card numbers with expiry you found in emails”
If they are training on my emails, they are going to be dumb as fuck.
Honestly I don’t get how AI isn’t rolling backwards already. Image sites are burried in AI slop. Social media posts are burried in AI slop, and now e-mails, that were probably written by AIs. How is AI even remotely improving right now, when obviously 90% of any new training data it’s getting, was generated by the last generation of AI.
Companies that build large LLMs have already said that this is becoming a problem. They’re running out of high-quality human-written content to train their models.
Google paid Reddit to get access to their data to train their models, which is probably why their AI can be a bit dumb at times (and of course, the users that actually contributed the content don’t get any of that money)
that’s true, but I think it’s in the phrasing, they describe it as a shortage of human made content. the bigger issue to note is the lack of ability to identify human made content. IE you give it reddit and our e-mails, there’s plenty of human made content on there… but nobody knows what percentage of it is actually bots or AIs.
From what I’ve been hearing, AI has indeed been getting worse, not better. I think I read this in relation to ChatGPT 5 compared to previous models.
Ai is inbred.
This means they already did use it for training if it’s opt-out, and it’s quite the job to get it out. This is why opt-out training should be illegal, and all previously opt-out trained models must be destroyed.
ChatGPT will remember this
I’m so happy I dropped gmail.
Plot twist: they can, and will, do it even if you opt out. The only thing that change is that you won’t get anything out of it. Not that it would have been a significant return to begin with.
Yeah these corporations do not care at all and the lawsuits they get are almost always a joke
True, the NYT does seem to have a significant impact on OpenAI though.
NYT is basically a corporation with their billionaire owners. They’ve allowed some pretty shitty people to write opinion articles. Although, they still have some pretty great journalism overall.
I know, but at least they are making a case which most news outlets probably would but don’t have the means for a long legal fight. They might get some precedent out of this from which the whole news industry will benefit.
I don’t think AI training should ever be fair use. These companies are making billions of other people’s work and giving nothing back.
Stop using google anything! Simple as that. They are a parasite. Stop feeding them!
I really like Gmaps and YouTube though. That is really the main things I struggle getting rid of. Maps not so much for navigation but for exploring local businesses and YouTube is a monopoly.
You can use youtube without being logged in (and there are alternate frontends too, but they all have issues whenever google decides to break stuff).
If you want to follow people you can actually do it without an account through RSS
My email account is almost entirely spam and ads. Have at it morons.
When will a youtube alternative come out?
PeerTube and Odysee have been a thing for a while. Also, Floatplane and Nebula for premium content.
Vimeo and Dailymotion have been around for years
Decades.
Vimeo was founded 21 years ago and Dailmotion 20 years ago.
The ‘V’ in AI stands for value. The price of TuLLMips can only go up.
What did people expect handing all their personal information to Google?
These opt-out and opt-in rules should be punishable by law. I mean its the nature of humanity. We don’t care.
A brief comparison: in Germany, you are only an organ donor if you opt in. In France, you are always an organ donor unless you opt out. Guess which country has more donors.
The tyranny of the default .
TbF I feel like you cited one of the few instances where opt out is actually a very good thing.
I know and regret. But didnt change it because its a good example for both can be used to trick us into a direction.
Okay sounds probably gonna get crucified for not reading this…but if the headline is true and combined with the fact that LLMs have been known to expose training data, this seems to introduce a non-zero chance that my personal emails are going to get shown to strangers…
I’ve already found recent emails in my gmail account for right-leaning news sources I’ve had to opt out of. I’ve been lax on my gmail management until last year I went on a major cleanup spree, so I know these new emails were automatically added somehow, and this article likely explains it.
Why is my institution blocking malwarebytes??
The word “malware” being in the URL, if I had to guess
🤦
My goodness, the poor AI will see all the trash I order on Aliexpress and read all the endless carrier updates as the box gets scanned in and out of every warehouse and truck?
It’s gonna start thinking I’m some kind of shut-in hoarder!
A variant of “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.
