Google's Data Domination: The Fallout of its AI Policy Shift

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Google over the weekend made an adjustment to their privacy policy and how they're using content on the web and scraping it for their AI models.

0:36And a lot of people are getting worried about it. So today on the podcast, we're going to talk about this controversy, as well as other things that Google is currently saying about AI and about the implications they see in AI. so to start off let's talk a little bit about what debbie weinstein who is currently google's uk and ireland boss what she's saying about ai because she believes that ai has the ability to help turn around uk's recent i guess you could call it growth stagnation because she believes it's actually going to boost their economy by 40 billion dollars by 2030 essentially enabling an annual growth rate of 2.6%.

1:16Now we're seeing a lot of headlines related to AI and essentially its impact on the economy out of the EU. Obviously the EU is trying to pass a lot of different AI regulations. We just saw about 150 CEOs and VCs out of the EU say that the current state of regulations that are trying to be passed are going to have a very bad effect on AI innovation and they believe that it's going to essentially allow Europe to get completely usurped as a technological hub. It's going to be really hard for them to compete and keep up with the US. And so it's really interesting to see a lot of these people talking about the benefits of AI.

1:53Perhaps they're trying to show regulators the pros that could be harnessed if they adequately harness AI. In any case, Debbie Weinstein does admit that some jobs are likely to be lost by AI, but she says that there's going to be, quote unquote, a whole new set of jobs that will be created. And she said, we are very conscious of the impact this technology will have on people. We want to make sure everyone has the skills they need. We're aware of this. We're aware this is a fundamental technology shift that will impact all of the lives. So I think Google's new report essentially comes amid a lot of different fears about the impact of AI on, you know, the entire economy in general.

2:35And so I think that really they're trying to paint the brighter picture of what it's able to do. And obviously Google is all in on AI. This is a very big deal for them. And that kind of brings us to the latest controversy around AI, which is the fact that Google has just changed their privacy policies to allow them essentially to scrape anything you have ever posted on the internet and use it in their AI models. So this comes essentially, people are able to kind of track this because Google has something where they'll keep track. They have an archive page of their previous policies and when they make a new one you're able to go and look at the end they'll highlight what what they've essentially added so previously um their policy just said that google was able to use you know public data to help train their language models um to build uh essentially google translate that's what they were saying they were using it for and now they have updated this to say that they're they said we may collect information that's publicly available online or from other public sources to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, then they also added BARD and Google Cloud AI capabilities.

3:48Or if your business's information appears on a website, we may index and display it on Google Services. Okay, so that next part wasn't that important. What's really important that a lot of people are talking about is the fact that Google essentially has updated the privacy policy explicitly saying that they are going to reserve the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build their AI tools. So if Google can read your words, you can pretty much assume that they belong to the company now. And you can expect that they're embedding these somewhere into one of their chatbots or one of their other AI tools.

4:21Fortunately, you know, a lot of people know about this change. And a lot of people are, you know, a lot of people are talking about it and bringing it up. But I doubt that this is going to have much of an impact as you, you know, as we talked about earlier, Google obviously is painting AI as this massive industry shift. I believe it is a massive industry shift. And in order to properly harness it, I think they're just going to try and just get as much data as they possibly can. Previously, Google said that the data was going to be used just for language models rather than AI models. But now they have changed that and they've added BARD and Google Cloud and a lot of other things into that.

4:58So I think this is actually kind of unusual this is not very common for a privacy policy normally these types of policies describe what a business is going to use the information for specifically on their own services but right now it seems like google is you know saying they reserve the right to harvest uh essentially your data posted anywhere on the internet um and you know i think this is not not very normal a lot of this is going to have to get litigated in in court for copyright reasons. Now, this isn't very far off from what OpenAI did, but it's very interesting to see Google making this shift and, you know, almost asserting their ownership of anyone's data that's ever been posted online.

5:36Now, this is also a bit of a controversial topic for other reasons this week, because Reddit and Twitter both have been taking a lot of heat because they're worried about the way that these AI models are essentially scraping their websites, scraping their social networks and taking in all of the comments and questions, the tweets, the Reddit threads, and posting it. So Reddit and Twitter both recently shut down access to their APIs, public APIs for free, which they're previously, you know, giving for free. They're allowing anyone to kind of get an API and scrape large amounts of their data and use it for other things.

6:14And consequently, a lot of third-party software and apps that were built on these APIs are completely broken now um having to shut down so a lot of people were of especially the people working on those third-party apps are noticeably upset a lot of people over at reddit are very upset about this um and both of the ceos are taking a very hard line approach reddit and twitter to this because essentially they're saying they're worried that all of their data is getting scraped and there's not much they can do about it twitter specifically released view limits so you can only view a certain amount of tweets an hour um to you know essentially ward off anyone that would just make a regular account or regular accounts and try to essentially scrape the site with as many views as possible for you know developing some of these ai tools i'll be interested to see um you know what google's approach to that is if they just kind of stand back from reddit and twitter and other you know places that are you know being very vocal about not wanting to be scraped or if they try to get sneaky it's kind of interesting because i feel like my assumption is that a lot of these companies would you know take a step back and say hey look obviously they don't want to us to scrape them we don't want to get sued we're going to step back but it looks like everyone is in such a mad rush for this data right now um that they're people are just scraping everything they can possibly get their hands on and so i think it's going to be really interesting to see if google takes that approach or if they're stepping back a little bit more from you know sites like reddit and twitter now that being said this is something you know facebook is not grappling with as much because from the very beginning facebook has shut down apis to pretty much all their data.

7:45They told Google from the very beginning, do not scrape or do not crawl our website. We want everything to be exclusively on our website. And so I feel like Facebook hasn't quite had the same problem other social sites have had, but it's going to be very interesting and I'll be very curious to see if these policy changes impact much around that or if this is mostly going to be Google going into your personal blog and anything else publicly available and scraping that for their own use cases.