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A long list of tech companies are rushing to give themselves the right to use people's data to train AI

A long list of tech companies are rushing to give themselves the right to use people's data to train AI::More companies are quietly giving themselves permission to use consumer data to train generative AI models and tools.

17 comments
  • Fuck all this noise. I “give myself” the right to never say a nice thing about these duplicitous asshats. I wish I could update a document to make it legal to steal shit from millions of people.

    Ethics don’t matter to these pieces of crap, despite all the pandering. Don’t ever trust what they say. Just watch what they do, and more importantly, what they don’t do.

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Over the last couple of months, companies as varied as Twitter, or X, Microsoft, Instacart, Meta, and Zoom have rushed to update their terms of service and/or privacy policies to allow the collection of information and content from people and customers as data to train generative artificial intelligence models.

    Tweets, web searches and apparently even grocery shopping are now an opportunity for companies to build more predictive tools like Bard and ChatGPT, which is owned by OpenAI and receives considerable backing from Microsoft.

    Users were only prompted to review updated Terms in September, in an email from the company announcing its partnership with OpenAI as "a new third-party sub-processor."

    However, Instacart also added language that left it a window to do just that with its own customers' data, saying its license now allows it to "...otherwise enhance our machine learning algorithms, for the purposes of operating, providing, and improving the services."

    "We're incorporating generative-AI experiences into our products to assist with customers' grocery shopping questions and help them make food-related decisions," the spokesperson said.

    At the end of August, it created a simple form where users could "request" to opt out of their data being used to train AI models.


    The original article contains 1,151 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

17 comments