It’s just a robots.txt flag that explicitly mentions a google user agent string. This is about as effective at stopping AI from training on your data as a “no trespassing” sign hidden behind the hedges of your unfenced lawn is at stopping trespassers.
Just like Google honors “do not track”, right?
So since what’s available now isn’t actually AI, what do we call it when we do get real AI? Will it be like what happened with HD? With True AI™ followed by Ultra AI™, AI4K™, and so on until we just call them master?
AGI (artificial general intelligence) is the current term for “The Concept Formerly Known As AI”. Not really a new term, but it’s only recently that companies decided that any algorithm can qualify as regular “AI” if they consider it good enough.
I’ve seen AGI thrown around. Artificial General Intelligence.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Large language models are trained on all kinds of data, most of which it seems was collected without anyone’s knowledge or consent.
Now you have a choice whether to allow your web content to be used by Google as material to feed its Bard AI and any future models it decides to make.
It’s as simple as disallowing “User-Agent: Google-Extended” in your site’s robots.txt, the document that tells automated web crawlers what content they’re able to access.
“We’ve also heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases,” the company’s VP of Trust, Danielle Romain, writes in a blog post, as if this came as a surprise.
On one hand that is perhaps the best way to present this question, since consent is an important part of this equation and a positive choice to contribute is exactly what Google should be asking for.
On the other, the fact that Bard and its other models have already been trained on truly enormous amounts of data culled from users without their consent robs this framing of any authenticity.
The original article contains 381 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 50%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
