A solo indie dev behind a relatively small game has revealed that, somehow, Google\u2019s AI had gained access to and shared unrevealed information about their game. Naturally, said developer was baffled to learn this was the case, especially when the \u201conly place where the info exists in a digital form\u201d was within a private Google Doc.<\/p>\n
This information comes via a Reddit thread<\/a> written by developer Klub Kofta Studio (thank you, GamesRadar<\/a>), the solo dev behind the tower defense game Operation Octo on Steam. As Klub Kofta explained, they spotted that a user in their Discord server had been asking Google AI some questions about Operation Octo, and received some \u201cobscure info that should not be available\u201d in response.<\/p>\n \u201cOut of curiosity, I chimed in and asked the player to ask the AI about future contents in my game,\u201d continued Klub Kofta. \u201cSomehow, the AI spitted out the exact & highly specific character name \u2018Vantage Tripod, which I had never mentioned to anyone. As far as I know, the only place where the info exists in a digital form is inside one of my own Google Docs, and this was NOT me speaking to the AI!\u201d<\/p>\n But Google has directly denied that information in your Google Drive\u2014or any Google service for that matter\u2014can be used to train its AI models. In 2023, Google\u2019s Product VP, Yulie Kwon Kim, stated<\/a> that Google does \u201cnot use your Workspace data to train or improve the underlying generative AI and large language models that power Bard, Search, and other systems outside of Workspace without permission.\u201d<\/p>\n So, if that\u2019s the case, is Klub Kofta simply mistaken? It\u2019s possible, but there\u2019s a far more likely explanation: the quote I just shared with you is woefully out of date.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t a case of me trying to mislead you, as Yulie Kwon Kim\u2019s statement is the most up-to-date official statement I could find published on Google\u2019s official blog. Turns out that Google has officially announced changes to its AI-training policies, though\u2014it\u2019s just that said information came in the form of an email. As TechCrunch<\/a> covered in July, Google announced via a customer email in June that it now uses your saved history and media \u201cto provide, develop, and improve its services (such as training generative AI models) and to protect Google, its users, and the public with the help of human reviewers.\u201d<\/p>\n Oh, and by the way, that setting is opt-out, not opt-in, which means that you\u2019ve probably been automatically signed up to share this info with Google already if you\u2019re signed up for any of its services. Here\u2019s a direct link to your Google Personalization settings<\/a> if you\u2019d like to turn that off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A solo indie dev behind a relatively small game has revealed that, somehow, Google\u2019s AI had gained access…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,844,3583,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-731111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-google","tag-indie","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}