FaceDeer

I have presupposed nothing.

You wrote:

The lung capacity of smokers is deficient, yes? Is the mere fact offensive? Should we just not talk about how someone struggling to breathe as they walk up stairs is the direct result of their smoking?

By using this analogy for the “brain rot” you claim comes from AI use, you are presupposing that it actually happens. You’re putting as much confidence in that as there is in the well-established but completely unrelated effect of smoking on lung capacity.

Ultimately, what this whole exchange boils down to:

OP: How do I tell people I don’t use AI without insulting them?

You: Tell them I think they’re stupid.

How useful.

It’s not a random fallacy, it’s the one you’re engaging in. Look it up. Your analogy presupposes an answer to the question that is actually at hand. It’s the classic “have you stopped beating your wife” situation.

This is literally begging the question.

What would the inoffensive way of phrasing it be?

…and then you proceed to spend the next two paragraphs continuing to rant about how mentally deficient you think AI users are.

Not that, for starters.

They’ve lost so much of their brains to AI, that even valid criticism of AI feel like personal insults to them.

More likely they feel insulted by people saying how “brain-rotted” they are.

This is the first time I’ve encountered the term and I understood it immediately.

I haven’t tested it, but I saw an article a little while back that you can add “don’t use emdashes” to ChatGPT’s custom instructions and it’ll leave them out from the beginning.

It’s kind of ridiculous that a perfectly ordinary punctuation mark has been given such stigma, but whatever, it’s an easy fix.

The “environmental destruction” angle is likely to cause trouble because it’s objectively debatable, and often presented in overblown or deceptive ways.

Except that is also a subjective and emotionally-charged argument.

and also alarming enough for them to take action.

Is this really an intent to explain in good faith? Sounds like you’re trying to manipulate their opinion and actions rather than simply explaining yourself.

If someone was to tell me that they simply don’t want to use generative AI, that they prefer to do writing or drawing by hand and don’t want suggestions about how to use various AI tools for it, then I just shrug and say “okay, suit yourself.”

I’m sure this thread will have more than just knee-jerk scary “feels” or inaccurate pop culture references in it, and we’ll be able to have a nice discussion about what the technology in the linked article is actually about.

If you believe that Google’s just going to brazenly lie about what they’re doing, what’s the point of changing the settings at all then?

In fact, Google is subject to various laws and they’re subject to concerns by big corporate customers, both of which could result in big trouble if they end up flagrantly and wilfully misusing data that’s supposed to be private. So yes, I would tend to believe that if the feature doesn’t say the data is being used for training I tend to believe that. It at least behooves those who claim otherwise to come up with actual evidence of their claims.

You are being sarcastic but this is indeed the case. Especially for companies like Google, which are concerned about being sued or dumped by major corporations that very much don’t want their data to be used for training without permission.

There’s a bit of a free-for-all with published data these days, but private data is another matter.

Yes, they are. Not sure why you are bringing that up.

I am bringing it up because the setting Google is presenting only describes using AI on your data, not training AI on your data.

Yes, exactly. Training an AI is a completely different process from prompting it, it takes orders of magnitude more work and can’t be done on a model that’s currently in use.

I have yet to see any of these news sites show evidence that this setting is for allowing training with your data. That’s not what the setting itself says, it seems like this is just a panicked ripple of clickbait titles sweeping rapidly across social media on a wave of AI dopamine.

Yes, but the point is that granting Google permission to manage your data by AI is a very different thing from training the AI on your data. You can do all the things you describe without also having the AI train on the data, indeed it’s a hard bit of extra work to train the AI on the data as well.

If the setting isn’t specifically saying that it’s to let them train AI on your data then I’m inclined to believe that’s not what it’s for. They’re very different processes, both technically and legally. I think there’s just some click-baiting going on here with the scary “they’re training on your data!” Accusation, it seems to be baseless.

Understand that basically ANYTHING that “uses AI” is using you for training data.

No, that’s not necessarily the case. A lot of people don’t understand how AI training and AI inference work, they are two completely separate processes. Doing one does not entail doing the other, in fact a lot of research is being done right now trying to make it possible to do both because it would be really handy to be able to do them together and it can’t really be done like that yet.

And if you read any of the EULAs

Go ahead and do so, they will have separate sections specifically about the use of data for training. Data privacy is regulated by a lot of laws, even in the United States, and corporate users are extremely picky about that sort of stuff.

If the checkbox you’re checking in the settings isn’t explicitly saying “this is to give permission to use your data for training” then it probably isn’t doing that. There might be a separate one somewhere, it might just be a blanket thing covered in the EULA, but “tricking” the user like that wouldn’t make any sense. It doesn’t save them any legal hassle to do it like that.

I’m not seeing where any of this gives Google permission to train AI using your data. As far as I can see it’s all about using AI to manage your data, which is a completely different thing. The word “training” appears to originate in Dave Jones’ tweet, not in any of the Google pages being quoted. Is there any confirmation that this is actually happening, and not just a social media panic?

How did you meet him?