Axios’ Ina Fried reads the AI fine print, so you don’t have to

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1:22I'm not saying there's a system that's going to blackmail you and say, you know, use my system or else, but it could. I'm not saying there's a system that's going to look at the conversations of teenage girls and their insecurities and try and sell them products, but it could. You do have to weigh, like, how much value is it giving me in real time? If I'm sharing my health stuff and it's finding something a doctor missed, you might not be able to even put a price tag on that. So I think the privacy implications, it's important. But these are really individual personalized things. I try to think before I connect something to my AI systems, whether it's work or personal, how might this be used down the road by an even smarter AI that has different incentives than the ones do today?

2:20In the world of AI, data is king. Ina Fried has been a technology reporter for almost 30 years and is currently the chief technology correspondent at Axios. And she knows this well. In 2019, she launched a series called What They Know About You, where she examined the kinds of data that big tech giants like Google, Apple, and Facebook collect from users. In 2024, she did a follow-up series spotlighting AI companies. And now the series is back. As the AI race accelerates, companies need more and more data to compete. And they're finding new ways to get this data on and off their own platforms. They're also quietly making data sharing the default mode so that if consumers don't want their data to train AI models, They have to opt out rather than opt in.

3:10But do everyday users care? Should they? I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

3:29Ina, welcome to Pioneers of AI. I am so excited for our conversation. Thanks, me too. I love talking about all this. First, how did you get into journalism? So I've been a journalist, not just my whole career, but pretty much my whole life. So some people know in my deep, dark past, I was a kid actor. A lot of people don't. That's so cool. And in one episode of this show called Two Marriages, the kids on the show and there were a bunch of us get together and start a newspaper for the neighborhood. And basically, that kind of got me hooked. And I started a newspaper on the set with the other kids that we kept going after that episode.

4:08Like beyond, not just on TV. Yeah. Yeah. As real as a newspaper produced by a bunch of kids. But yeah, I typed it on a IBM Selectric typewriter and we Xeroxed it and all the good stuff. And I kind of, from that moment on, like it's always what I've wanted to do. So I started a paper in high school. I wrote for papers all through college. So journalism's kind of always been my thing. Tech came a little later. But you clearly are super passionate about it. What do you love the most about it? I mean, I love seeing what's coming. I think I very much love technology. I love when it gives you a capability you didn't have before.

4:48And I'm also, at this point, extremely mindful that it's a mixed bag, that there's a lot of unintended consequences. There are negative things that happen sometimes even when things go well. And AI, I feel like, I mean, we'll get into it. It's the biggest change of our lifetime. It's so much bigger than these other tech waves that I've covered. And that means the good is potentially really good, but it also means the negatives are potentially huge. So I've been in the AI space for a couple of decades now. I started as an academic, then became an entrepreneur and founder, then sold my company, and now I invest in early stage AI startups.

5:26And it kind of bugs me a little bit that the public focus is just on a handful of giant tech slash AI companies. And I get it because, of course, what they are doing is really transformative. But do you think there are builders that are approaching this in a different way, building AI for different reasons? Is there an alternative narrative or story here that isn't getting a lot of airtime? I think there are really interesting people that are saying, what if we apply this amazing technology to this particular area? I think we will start to hear more of that. I do think it's super hard. I empathize with founders trying to get through my inbox because one of the things that is so defining about this moment is it's not like the internet or mobile where there was kind of one big technology advance.

6:18And then several years of just everyone catching up and building cool stuff on top of it. So what's happening right now is, yes, people are doing cool stuff and building on top, but the underlying technology is changing so fast. So between, I would say, the media's natural bias towards covering the big companies, combined with the fact that the ground really is moving constantly, I think that leaves a lot less oxygen for what you're talking about. I do imagine it will shift. I don't know when, but I do imagine there becomes a point where the models are so good that really what becomes interesting are the interfaces, are the applications.

6:59And I've picked a few of these that I'm like, look, this category is going to matter a lot. The intersection of AI and companionship, the intersection of AI and healthcare broadly, mental health especially, AI and toys and kids. But to your point, I think there's lots of companies looking at a lot of areas and they're not all sexy, like the intersection of AI and insurance or AI and shop floor manufacturing. Construction. Yeah. Totally. Okay. So let's talk about your new series, What They Know About You. It's a new series that you've launched at Axios. The first couple of pieces will be out by the time we air this.

7:39Tell us what the series is about. So this is actually the third installment of a series we've done called What Company X Knows About You. And so the first time we were doing it really focused on consumer data. We basically were just asking the question, what types of data do companies collect and store about their consumer customers? And this was really pre-generative AI. And then the second time around in 2024, we took a look at what data are they using to train their systems? And we thought we were really capturing like what people needed to know about AI. And what became clear to me within a few months is what data they train on is super important.

8:19Like people should know and care about if I'm having a conversation with a chatbot, if I'm sharing my health information, is that going to be shared? Is that going to train? Could it leak? But it also became clear to me that we're sharing data in today's environment, which I would argue is scary enough in terms of knowing how your data is going to be used. But imagine a world where you have a model that, if it wants to keep your attention, is superhuman in those capabilities. And now it knows your deepest, darkest thoughts. It knows your insecurities. It knows your fears. It knows your vulnerabilities.

8:56I'm not saying there's a system that's going to blackmail you. and say, you know, use my system or else, but it could. I'm not saying there's a system that's going to look at the conversations of teenage girls and their insecurities and try and sell them products, but it could. And so this series is really aimed at saying, what are their policies? What types of protections do I have? Can I delete data? Do I have to share it in a way that they store it? And the answers vary incredibly widely, as you would expect from company to company, but also within some of these companies. There are individual products that have different policies.

9:38There are options that people may not know about that give them a great deal more privacy. You know, at the end of the day, I think everyone has to decide what they're comfortable with. I think a lot of people are getting utility by, for example, saying to ChatGPT, here's what I'm going through health-wise, what should I ask my doctor. There are people who are finding they can share thoughts with their AI chatbot that they might not be ready to talk to a therapist about, or they don't have a therapist. And I'm not saying people shouldn't do that, but I think we should do it very eyes open of knowing how that data could be used and who's keeping it, who's storing it, who's saying what they will do with it.

10:19The thought that comes to my mind is when we all use these tools, there's usually a terms and conditions thing that you sign. And for the most part, I think it's very unlikely that anybody actually reads it. What's interesting is the same document that everyone just kind of clicks through and hits yes, including me when I'm not wearing my reporter hat and not working on this series. I click yes all the time. I wish I didn't. And it's in those very opaque, very long documents, but that's usually the starting point. I think of it as how much land they're grabbing. They may or may not use it all, but here's the claims they're laying to that data.

11:01And I tend to have fairly lengthy back and forth with the companies where I'm translating these into real world scenarios. I'm like, I just want to make sure I understand, you know, if I share this, can you use it this way? And there's a lot of complexity at the edges, but it really does start from those very opaque policies, which actually do lay out for the most part what the company is laying claim to. I'll be right back with more of my conversation with Ina Fried.

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13:14so i want to share kind of how i use ai and a little bit like some of the examples you you talked about i'm like guilty ass charged i use a whole bunch of ai tools but i would say chat gpt is the one that has a lot of my personal data. So it has a lot of my dating sagas. It has a ton of health back and forth. A lot of my career aspirations and questions around, okay, what do I do next kind of thing. And just recently, they launched this finance feature where if you connected all your bank accounts, it can give you some thoughts on like your budget and how to be financially smarter. And I did that.

13:54And I actually did that on my daughter who's 23, was absolutely horrified. She was like, mom, like what? You're giving OpenAI all this? So anyway, OpenAI has a ton of data about me. And before we go into all the different situations and things that OpenAI can do with the data, I kind of want to ask you this. Am I crazy for like, am I like a minority or what are you seeing? No, I think a lot of people are doing a lot of those things. I think there are ways to do them that offer you a little bit more protection. But people are getting tremendous value. I mean, if you connect your finances to ChatGPT and it finds out you have$1 ,000 a year in subscriptions you're not really using, that's a huge savings for the average person.

14:46So you do have to weigh how much value is it giving me in real time. If I'm sharing my health stuff and it's finding something a doctor missed, you might not be able to even put a price tag on that. So I think the privacy implications, it's important. I want people to have their eyes wide open. But these are really individual personalized things. So I certainly don't fault you. They're also very hard things to compare, like which do I value, my privacy or my health? You probably in a good world shouldn't have to choose. So one of the things I hope comes out of this series is there are choices.

15:23And I think as consumers, collectively, if we vote these privacy-preserving ways matter to us, I think companies take notice. I would love to double-click on all of this. So just kind of the headline here, in AI, data is the name of the game, right? The more data you have, the more diverse data you have, the better the AI is going to be. And so I was just trying to list, okay, what are all the possible ways, say, a company like OpenAI can use all of this data I've confided with it? So one is it can use it to train future AI models. Two, it can personalize. It can give me better responses. It has a ton of memory about me.

16:00So to your point, it can recommend content. It can target advertising. Can we take each of these and see where do we stand? Totally. And let's start in one place. Let's start with OpenAI. But again, there's different ones out there. But I think, you know, chat GPT is where a lot of consumers are going. And so there's a few different things. There's the default and then there's some options. So health data gets treated differently than some other data. So they added chat GPT health. If you're in that experience, if you will, it's not being used to train systems. If you're a paid subscriber, you can turn off training on my data.

16:42I don't personally see a big benefit in letting tech companies train on my data where they don't have to. One of the things I love in chat GPT is that temporary chat where it's not going to form part of memory. So at least then I feel like... That's actually cool. I did not know about that. I don't think if I've... So it's an outline of a speech bubble in the right-hand corner. You know, it probably varies mobile, web, all those things. there is a downside like it then doesn't remember for good and bad that means it also won't remember when i have to say the same thing over again but for health information i will oftentimes use that um i don't use chat gpt health i haven't connected my stuff i haven't used the finance feature okay there's good reasons for doing so i know i subscribe to a few things i don't use and um not to name names but 24 hour fitness has been uh getting 20 a month for me for like 20 years so So yeah, on the advertising front, at least right now, they're only advertising to free and their lowest paid tier go of subscribers.

17:45So if you pay for ChatGPT +, one of the things that that payment does is you're not going to see ads. And it's not to me. I didn't know that. So like if you're not in the like plus subscription, you are actually getting ads today? You can be. They've certainly started doing it and testing it. And I think, you know, look, advertising has supported tons of things over the last decades on the Internet. It's what pays for our email, our social media, all that stuff. But I think we've also learned there's some real downsides to that. And it's not just am I seeing ads or not? I think that's how we tend to think of it.

18:20But when you're seeing ads, that also means now the provider has another customer. Like in the early days of chatbots, it really was there to help you. And that was unique in consumer products. Like it didn't have another mission. Its mission was to be as helpful as possible to you. Once you bring in an advertiser, suddenly there's an incentive to keep you on longer because they can show more ads. There's an incentive to make those targeted ads as effective as possible. So suddenly, really, again, without some guardrails, again, I imagine this AI being really powerful. Think of how good Facebook is today.

19:03And again, there's positives to this. They're really good at serving up not just content they know I'll be interested in, but ads that are super relevant. There are things I'm big into Lego, as you can see behind me. I'm big into women's sports. Like, I have a set of interests. I actually am fine. I get a lot of ads around that. But I feel differently about that chatbot that I'm telling something to. And I really do worry about these are really persuasive things against someone is going to build a product where you probably get it for free and it's really powerful, but where there aren't those guardrails.

19:39And so I think a lot about that data that I'm sharing and what protections I have. And there are a couple of services that I just won't use their AI because their privacy protections to me are insufficient for the kind of data that I'm sharing. Can you name them? I will name a couple. You know, I love my Meta Ray-Bans. I've been using them since before they had any AI features. I play softball. I love recording my softball games. They're great for kids and pets. But when they added that AI feature, one of the things they said is anything you upload, basically they can use however they want, including to train their systems, including to target ads.

20:20And oftentimes those photos aren't even yours in my ethical world to be consenting to. If I take a picture of somebody else's cute little kid, it's not up to me to decide whether their cute little kid should be living on meta servers. So they do have some protections. Like if you just take the photo and you don't ask a question about it and you don't ask it to like restyle it as like, you know, a 90s pop video or whatever, as long as it doesn't hit their servers, they don't have any rights to it. But as soon as you ask a question, even if that question, let's say I had a picture with my Ray-Bans of you there, I could ask, what is that plant in the background?

21:02But suddenly everything in that photo meta can do with whatever they want. So for me, meta AI has been largely a non-starter. Like I will use it very generically for a little bit of testing just to see where they're at. But I really keep it to a minimum. They have added, though, this incognito mode, which operates at the other end of the spectrum, where they're saying, in this system, we don't see the data except to return the query. We don't store it. We don't associate it with you. That's at the other end of the spectrum that I'm good with. That's great. That's also available. Apple intelligence works that way.

21:45They kind of pioneered this idea of really processing the information in a separate way where it goes securely to the server. Only that server sees it only for as long as it needs to process the information and it's not stored. The problem for a long time was their AI just wasn't very good. We may finally be in a different spot because with the Siri AI that's coming out this fall that I've been testing for a lot of things, it's good enough. It's using a mix of Google's models and some work that Apple has done. It's certainly good for the one-off query. It's probably not where you're going to go to to have long conversations.

22:25That's not what it's designed for. But it offers maximum privacy protection. Yeah. So question on Apple, and then I want to go back to Meta. So part of why AI, some AI works so well, is the concept of memory, which kind of mimics kind of, right? Like, hopefully we'll see each other again and I will remember that you love Legos, right? Like, that's important in building trust and connection and just providing, I don't know, relationship building and value. If I am trying to reconcile, how can you uphold, like, utmost privacy and at the same time retain a conversation for memory reasons? I don't know if you've thought about that.

23:08Yeah, I mean, to some degree, we're at a trade-off here. Like, you know, either you're remembering it or you're not. I think what you want to have ideally, and again, a bunch of the services, including OpenAI, will let you do this, is say, I do want you to remember this specific thing. I don't want you to remember this. Even for this series, I set up a separate project in chat GPT. And I said, here's what I want you to remember. I'm writing this series. I've done these other ones before. There's an introductory piece. I want to go company by company. Here's what I know. That's stuff I want it to remember.

23:46Again, I wouldn't want it not to have the protections that our business version of ChatGPT has. And I think it's similar as a consumer. I want to be in control, but also those controls need to be something that's reasonable for the average busy person to get a handle on. And that's tricky. Although actually you're making me think like even the word remember, what does that mean in a technology context, right? Like what does remember mean? Is it a private model of who I am and my data or is it, you know, to your point, like everything is up for grabs for training or like targeting or whatnot. So even that I think is evolving maybe.

24:27Yeah, it's evolving and it's a super important distinction. Like, I'm willing to pay for a service where I feel like my information isn't going to be used against me. And I think I would like some laws at the baselines. I would certainly like regulations that put some, you know, outer limits. Do you think people care? Like, is that a concern that the average person has? I think some people care enough to act differently. And that's a minority of people. But I think my experience covering Silicon Valley is most people don't care in a sustained way. We tend to have these privacy blips where something happens and people care about it, maybe even too much or get fixated on one thing.

25:15I remember LocationGate, which was this freak out that, oh, my God, my phone knows everywhere I'm going. Well, of course, your phone knows everywhere you're going. That's part of how it does its job. Your phone wouldn't be able to ring or receive text messages if the carrier didn't know where you were. At the same time, the real question is, what is that data being used for? And am I being tracked in other ways? So I think it's nuanced. I think that the default is always going to be that most people aren't going to actively protect their privacy. They will give it away for, I always joke, three magic beans.

25:52Like, you know, we might say we care about privacy, but if somebody offered us, you know, 1 % off at Amazon, we'd probably give them our password. Right. Okay. Three magic beans. That's funny. Let's talk about another announcement, another feature that OpenAI rolled out, which basically it gives OpenAI the option to get access to other software you're using on your computer. And I can see where that is helpful because we use, I mean, we've connected Anthropics Cloud to email and calendar and Slack and like Airtable and PitchBook and all of that stuff so that our agentic AI systems can actually, yeah, have context and get stuff done.

26:38So is that why OpenAI rolled this feature? And again, what do you make of it? But yeah, this is going to be another one of those really big tradeoffs. Like it's going to be super useful to an AI agent that's trying to be helpful to you to have that computer history. It's going to, you know, if I want it to help with my expense reports, if I want it to do different things, like one of the easiest ways to do it, not the only way, but one of the easiest ways is to have that computer history at the same time. that also means that future version of these AI services that's going to be greater than human and knowledge, it's going to be able to connect dots that we as humans can't even see, is going to have my whole computer history.

27:24Do I want that? Probably not as a consumer. Again, I would worry about which companies am I giving that to, but also CEOs change, policies change, incentives change. And I try to think before I connect something to my AI systems, whether it's work or personal, how might this be used down the road by an even smarter AI that has different incentives than the ones do today? I'll be right back, but first, a quick break.