The fact they they currently don’t need to and the fact that they don’t plan to, doesn’t mean they can’t. They’re sitting on a huge stockpile of stuff they can use, and thinking a company will store my gigabytes of data for years on end and never delete it and not even use it in hopes to get me to use their other products is ridiculous. They’re clearly using it in one way or another, whichever that way turns out to be.

No one expected Microsoft to run the same shit on all their products yet here we are regardless.

Again, that is mostly an example. Of course, it wouldn’t even be a good idea to begin with.

But people seem confused, so now my question is how would I make it more obvious that is just a simplified example

That is precisely why they’re getting sued. We’re not sure if it’s legal, ethical or how copyright applies since it’s not using your code but learning from it

Read my other comment. I was more trying to make an example rather than something anyone would actually wanna do.

It was more about illustrating that the use we have for data is not necessarily the same one a company has for it.

Never said it had to be a successful AI, or a good idea

That was more an example, rather than something they would actually do. Of course there is a million other ways of doing it, but the more control you have over the data, the better you can develop an AI.

I mean, Google’s already mastered AI. People tend to think of natural intelligence (like humans) when they think about the development of AI.

AI is just a learning system. Google recommendations are a complex calculation on everything that you’ve recently interacted with to figure out the thing most likely you’ll want next.

Unless the function is completely static, which I doubt, it would be considered AI, even if it doesn’t attempt to imitate real intelligence. The function is probably given some weights from Google engineers (basically, what results are valuable), and through trial and error, the program is likely learning how to get more clicks. The more data it can process, the more users it has to try with, the faster it can advance.

This is of course pretty simplistic compered to the math behind how this works, but it gets the point across

Say Google wants to develop an AI that writes books right? So they need a lot of text written by humans to train it right? Well, Google Docs is full of that.

Microsoft and OpenAI did the same thing with coding AI’s. They’ve trained GPT3 on GitHub code to get AIs to write code.

Google’s business is advertising after all, so just like they could train an AI to write, imagine how much data they can collect and feed to algorithms about you to target ads that they know will sway you. It’s not necessarily that an employee at Google is reading your emails. Or that the government is spying on you to catch criminals. The issue is more that an algorithm/AI is learning all about you and honing itself to recommend what you will consume, and thus, generate clicks and money for them.