You are being sarcastic but this is indeed the case. Especially for companies like Google, which are concerned about being sued or dumped by major corporations that very much don't want their data to be used for training without permission.
There's a bit of a free-for-all with published data these days, but private data is another matter.
Yes, they are. Not sure why you are bringing that up.
I am bringing it up because the setting Google is presenting only describes using AI on your data, not training AI on your data.
Yes, exactly. Training an AI is a completely different process from prompting it, it takes orders of magnitude more work and can't be done on a model that's currently in use.
The setting in question says nothing about training AI. Training is a completely different process from using AI, both technically and legally. This appears to be some kind of clickbait panic getting crossposted everywhere.
I have yet to see any of these news sites show evidence that this setting is for allowing training with your data. That's not what the setting itself says, it seems like this is just a panicked ripple of clickbait titles sweeping rapidly across social media on a wave of AI dopamine.
Yes, but the point is that granting Google permission to manage your data by AI is a very different thing from training the AI on your data. You can do all the things you describe without also having the AI train on the data, indeed it's a hard bit of extra work to train the AI on the data as well.
If the setting isn't specifically saying that it's to let them train AI on your data then I'm inclined to believe that's not what it's for. They're very different processes, both technically and legally. I think there's just some click-baiting going on here with the scary "they're training on your data!" Accusation, it seems to be baseless.
Understand that basically ANYTHING that "uses AI" is using you for training data.
No, that's not necessarily the case. A lot of people don't understand how AI training and AI inference work, they are two completely separate processes. Doing one does not entail doing the other, in fact a lot of research is being done right now trying to make it possible to do both because it would be really handy to be able to do them together and it can't really be done like that yet.
And if you read any of the EULAs
Go ahead and do so, they will have separate sections specifically about the use of data for training. Data privacy is regulated by a lot of laws, even in the United States, and corporate users are extremely picky about that sort of stuff.
If the checkbox you're checking in the settings isn't explicitly saying "this is to give permission to use your data for training" then it probably isn't doing that. There might be a separate one somewhere, it might just be a blanket thing covered in the EULA, but "tricking" the user like that wouldn't make any sense. It doesn't save them any legal hassle to do it like that.
But then the roof has to support the entire weight of planet Earth on top of it, which is a much harder engineering challenge than pumping the electricity in the first place.
I'm not seeing where any of this gives Google permission to train AI using your data. As far as I can see it's all about using AI to manage your data, which is a completely different thing. The word "training" appears to originate in Dave Jones' tweet, not in any of the Google pages being quoted. Is there any confirmation that this is actually happening, and not just a social media panic?
"If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be an experiment, would it?"
The similarity lies in what accusations the Americans are slinging, not their physical proximity.
If you believe that Google's just going to brazenly lie about what they're doing, what's the point of changing the settings at all then?
In fact, Google is subject to various laws and they're subject to concerns by big corporate customers, both of which could result in big trouble if they end up flagrantly and wilfully misusing data that's supposed to be private. So yes, I would tend to believe that if the feature doesn't say the data is being used for training I tend to believe that. It at least behooves those who claim otherwise to come up with actual evidence of their claims.