Gemini is "reading" your documents in the same sense that google servers are "reading" your documents in order to show them in your browser. Gemini is not a person and won't remember what it has "read".
If you don't want google to handle your documents, then don't put your documents in Google docs.
I get what you’re saying. But at a fundamental level there’s a difference between “using” content to do the thing I’m asking you to do (display it in a browser) and running it through an AI to do processing on that content.
I personally think the two situations are quite different.
I agree that if you don’t want Google to sniff on your content you shouldn’t put it on their servers to begin with.
That said, stating that Gemini won’t remember, is dubious. Because given the track record of these companies I have my doubts that they don’t log everything they can put their hands on.
Google Docs does a lot of algorithms over the data you put in. For instance, it paginate them and show a page count. This is an algorithm processing your data exactly like Gemini does. There is no option in Google Docs to avoid the pagination algorithm from reading my data and processing it.
Another example: Google Docs indexes the contents of your document. That is, it stores all the words in a big database that you don't see and don't have access to, so that you can search for "tax" in the Google Docs search bar and bring up all documents that contain the word "tax". There is no option in Google Docs to avoid indexing the contents of a document for the purpose of searching for it.
When you decide to put your data into Google Docs, you are OK with Google processing your data in several ways (that should hopefully be documented). The fact that you seem so upset that a specific algorithm is processing your data just because it has the "AI" buzzword attached to it, seems like an overreaction prompted by the general panic we're living in.
I agree Google should be clear (and it is clear) whether Gemini is being trained on your data or not, because that is something that can have side effects that you have the right to be informed about. But Gemini just processing your data to provide feature N+1 among the other 2 billions available, it's really not something noteworthy.
> For instance, it paginate them and show a page count.
Do you think this information google is gathering can then be used in the future to paginate some other document? Do you think paginating my doc will help their algorithm to better paginate documents in the future? I see what you're trying to say but putting everything in the "algorithm" bucket doesn't help moving the whole conversation around AI forward.
> The fact that you seem so upset
Your upset detector is clearly wrong. I don't use google docs. I don't care about google docs. I'm just adding my 2c to a conversation around this type of practices google and co are using.
Isn't this why we're here on HN? To exchange ideas?
Google is pretty good at separating inference from training. If they wish to train on your data they do that by just training on your data, them running the model on that data to give you info is totally separate.
“Google collects your Gemini Apps conversations, related product usage information, info about your location, and your feedback. Google uses this data, consistent with our Privacy Policy, to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine-learning technologies, including Google’s enterprise products such as Google Cloud.”
“To help with quality and improve our products (such as generative machine-learning models that power Gemini Apps), human reviewers read, annotate, and process your Gemini Apps conversations. We take steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting your conversations with Gemini Apps from your Google Account before reviewers see or annotate them. Please don’t enter confidential information in your conversations or any data you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine-learning technologies.” [italics was bold in the original]
You can opt out of that. Its explained right after what you have quoted.
> To stop future conversations from being reviewed or used to improve Google machine-learning technologies, turn off Gemini Apps activity. You can review your prompts or delete your conversations from your Gemini Apps activity at myactivity.google.com/product/gemini.
Right now it’s an AI but Google has been “reading” your docs since they invented Google Search, Gmail and Google Docs are just extensions. It’s literally in their business model, collect all your info to show you relevant ads.
Oh, I know. I'm aware of that. Which is why I don't use a free gmail account, I don't use google docs, and I run as much ad blocking as possible both at the browser and at the network level. And that's also why i'm sure google is collecting as much data as possible when people use gemini. Because why wouldn't they? It's their entire business model: collect data and then sell ads based on that.
> But at a fundamental level there’s a difference between “using” content to do the thing I’m asking you to do (display it in a browser) and running it through an AI to do processing on that content.
The thing you're asking it to do is to maintain the state of the document in a service. This way it's able to display the state of the document to one or more clients.
Arguably running through AI is even a more privacy-preserving feature, because Google Docs most certainly stores the data to a persistent storage (it is its main feature and cannot work without it), whereas AIs just needs to run the data in RAM.
Just so we're clear, I'm personally not using G Docs nor Gemini nor any other AI tool at the moment. My issue—if you can call it that way—is more fundamental and that is related to intentions.
I think using some data for something that's fundamentally different than its original use case is problematic in my view.
You gave them your consent when you opened the document in Google Docs.
And it is not like Gemini is the first NLP model to be reading your google docs. Google have had one of the most advanced spell/grammar checkers reading through your docs for years now.
