Google Isn't Mining Your Docs (Yet), but G/O Media Is All In On AI

By Nate Parker | | July 6, 2023 |

By Nate Parker | | July 6, 2023 |

A rumor traveled the techier corners of Twitter and other social media sites that Google had updated their Docs Terms of Service to include data mining for the purpose of training their own AI system, Google Bard. It was enough to make Google Docs trend because nothing annoys a nerd like a free service being changed in a way they didn’t demand: that, and AI is both dumb and evil. As far as I can tell, the rumor originated with a few confused posters who took secondhand information and ran with it. The primary source appears to be this thread by cybersecurity professor Alvaro Cintas.

Google has integrated AI into Workspace!

It is a game changer. You now can have an assistant on Google Docs, Sheets, Gmail, and more.

Here is how you can get access and use it to save hours: pic.twitter.com/8eIFjxDjxa

— Alvaro Cintas (@dr_cintas) June 29, 2023

Long story short, if you’re signed up for Labs and jump through some hoops, you eventually receive access to Google AI tools. You need to sign up for a waitlist and sign your life away first. It’s very much an opt-in scenario. So relax! Google isn’t reading your smutty Silo-themed fanfic. At least not yet.

But that’s the thing; Terms of Service can be updated at any time, and if you’ve hit that Accept button without reading 47 pages of technical legalese, there’s no recourse. What’s being tested in Labs will almost inevitably hit the main Google products, including Docs, Sheets, and Gmail. It will eventually strip every angry email you sent Dustin over his Manifest coverage. Google is hardly alone in encouraging its user base to hand over their every document for examination. Microsoft hyped Office 365 Copilot in March, as they seek more collaboration on their LLM. The last I knew it was still in small-scale testing, but it isn’t going away. It makes sense. As AI continues churning out garbage articles on CNET and G/O Media, it’s corrupting its knowledge base. It’s a phenomenon IBM programmer George Fueschel dubbed GIGO back in the 1960s: Garbage In, Garbage Out. The resulting articles are so bad that it took minutes for the Internet to call out Gizmodo’s new bot.

Io9’s actual staff weren’t part of this decision, nor were they pleased, particularly given the recent layoffs by G/O Media. The GMG Union put out a statement condemning the move, though neither is likely to sway the opinions of G/O executives. Deadspin and A.V. Club posted similar and equally worthless articles.

Google and Microsoft hope your documents and email will provide better data sources than G/O Media has available. My guess — which is barely better than someone who brings their laptop to Geek Squad — is that both Google Docs and the free version of Microsoft Office 365 will update their ToS to include AI permissions within a few years. Most people will accept it rather than deal with the hassle of switching products. Tools like Grammarly already “process your text,” which is tech-speak for reading your every keystroke. This won’t feel very different to the average user.

I’m mostly convinced AI bots will never progress past its current, low-quality call-and-response stage until genuine advances in machine intelligence are made, years from now. I don’t think we’re substantially closer to that than we are to Skynet, the “Metaverse,” or productive VR. There’s a greater chance it’s another NFT debacle than anything genuinely innovative. Ultimately it’ll be consigned to your standard SEO conglomeration sites, or political trash blogs like Gateway Pundit. Short-term, though, it’s going to cost a lot of jobs. What can you do? Don’t accept terms on software that lets them train AI off your work. Don’t click on Bot bylines on Gizmodo, A.V. Club, and others. Only read terrible articles written by real people. That’s why we’re here.