It’s your data. Do you know what Big Tech is doing with it? Our tech columnist found Google, Meta and Microsoft are taking your conversations, photos or documents to teach their their AI.
Terms of service for paid accounts say that the content isn’t scanned for any reason. So I guess the other way to avoid feeding the machine is to pay to operate the machine while it feeds on others…
All I get in my Gmail is spam and confirmation codes for 2fa shit. Their AI is just gonna end up being really good at mimicking spam and hacking into accounts.
I mean yes, but this has been true for nearly 20 years at this point. Some of this comes back as useful features for everyone. Spam filtering, grammar checking, predictive text, maps route planning, face detection for all sorts of things. The same is true for many modern cars too, security cameras, etc. It all has to be trained on something and to collect more edge cases to improve.
I feel like the things you list had more human input, as built, and more scope to take human feedback into account to amend any issues.
The latter could of course be similarly used to refine AI versions, but as cost-cutting is a major attraction, this seems unlikely to happen unless the AI is do poor that the errors cost too much otherwise.
As things stand, we now must guess what a customer service bot or search engine might understand, framing our terms to fit our beliefs about how massed groups might make the same enquiry. Relatively simple tech questions are met, not with the conversations initiated by people with similar queries, but with reams of links to material offering solutions to almost the opposite problem. I.e.: “how do I disable x on y?” must be asked “disable x y?”, but you’ll struggle to find any link which isn’t “y is great, learn about the cool new x feature on y”, x is great, enable x", “what to do if you cannot enable x”. Maybe some bots telling you why wanting to disabling x is futile & wouldn’t you like to learn how great x is? “Your life will suffer if you disable x. You won’t be able to do things you never ever & would never want to do if you disable x” Which, for some things, there’s some validity to some parts of that, but for disabling a bloatware messaging app? Not so much, and potentially just indicative of terrible architecture.
Perhaps I should be optimistic that AI will rapidly patch this type of issue, being able to return responses that have a good analysis of the query, but feel it is more likely that flawed AI will hijack the whole.
It has been a good run, but swathes of us have lost what were standard means of seeking information.
Oh I don’t feel I’ve lost those means, and often prefer them still, but find even people of my generation who grew up without constant access to the internet fall to pieces at the prospect of looking in a book, a paper map or writing a letter, etc.
It is as if they forget the information persists without connectivity.
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