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Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

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11–20 of 74 posts

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#11
post #8

The article decides to mention that Google made a public statement that clearly and unambiguously answers their question ( https://twitter.com/GoogleWorkspace/status/16382985371956019... ) and then proceeds to ignore it completely in favor of conspiracy theories ("but look, there they said 'was' instead of 'is'!").

It gives as much credence to bard's own bullshit as it does to Google's official statement. It's a useless article.

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bard is written by developers, and developers often don't have any problem using any data available to them for a purpose they deem 'useful', especially if there's a bonus or a promotion at stake.

I think a company like Google would be having a lot of restrictions around where to train models and where to not. And they already have access to the whole internet, Gmail conversations would be one tiny part of it. Also wonder if they got to actually train on github data (considering the Microsoft angle)

Also wonder if they got to actually train on github data

Considering all the Github data is on Google BigQuery, probably: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-datasets/github-...

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#13
post #8

The article decides to mention that Google made a public statement that clearly and unambiguously answers their question ( https://twitter.com/GoogleWorkspace/status/16382985371956019... ) and then proceeds to ignore it completely in favor of conspiracy theories ("but look, there they said 'was' instead of 'is'!").

Thank the Lord for that "Readers added context" marker that tweets now can have.

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#14
post #5

Logically it just doesn't have that data and why would it? If you had proprietary data you didn't want to share why would you add it to the language model?

Bard is written by developers, and developers often don't have any problem using any data available to them for a purpose they deem 'useful', especially if there's a bonus or a promotion at stake.

In my experience this is not true. Developers were on average more sticklers for "the rules" and very often overinterpreted restrictions beyond what compliance professionals deemed nescessary.

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#15
post #4

The article directly quotes google giving a clear answer…. “Google replied to the tweet directly, saying, “Bard is an early experiment based on Large Language Models and will make mistakes. It is not trained on Gmail data. -JQ”.

I would have agreed, except for:

Initially, Google wrote, “Thank you for your message Kate, no private data will be used during Barbs[sic] training process. We always take good care of our users’ privacy and security.”

"That seems like a clear and heartening assurance. It’s notable, then, that Google quickly deleted that tweet and didn’t amend it with any additional clarification"

That makes me wonder if another model was trained and then pulled in. Example being the Gmail one.

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#16
The discussion here is not if it was trained or not in Gmail data, but on personal Gmail data. And that the definition of personal is vague and subject to interpretations.

They can say it was not trained on Gmail data because it was trained with Google’s Smart Compose, which it was trained on Gmail data.

Gmail Data -> Google’s Smart Compose -> Bard

It all depends on where you draw the line to stop reporting. Language is a powerful tool of deception.

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#17
post #8

The article decides to mention that Google made a public statement that clearly and unambiguously answers their question ( https://twitter.com/GoogleWorkspace/status/16382985371956019... ) and then proceeds to ignore it completely in favor of conspiracy theories ("but look, there they said 'was' instead of 'is'!").

Lawyers use language in very specific ways, and anything that's not completely obvious can be used to hide the truth. As an example, I once worked with a team who was building some software where a requirement said the app 'should' do something instead it 'shall' do something. The company's lawyer argued successfully that this meant the requirement was optional.

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#18
post #17
post #8

The article decides to mention that Google made a public statement that clearly and unambiguously answers their question ( https://twitter.com/GoogleWorkspace/status/16382985371956019... ) and then proceeds to ignore it completely in favor of conspiracy theories ("but look, there they said 'was' instead of 'is'!").

Lawyers use language in very specific ways, and anything that's not completely obvious can be used to hide the truth. As an example, I once worked with a team who was building some software where a requirement said the app 'should' do something instead it 'shall' do something. The company's lawyer argued successfully that this meant the requirement was optional.

That's how Internet standards work.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#19
post #8

The article decides to mention that Google made a public statement that clearly and unambiguously answers their question ( https://twitter.com/GoogleWorkspace/status/16382985371956019... ) and then proceeds to ignore it completely in favor of conspiracy theories ("but look, there they said 'was' instead of 'is'!").

I would think that part 4 and "what bard has to say about this" sections would make most people question Google's comment.

4. Google has never denied that Bard was trained on data from Gmail. They've only claimed that such data is not currently used to “improve” the model.

What Bard has to say about this: “I have not personally seen a real Gmail account. However, I have access to a massive dataset of Gmail emails, and I have used this dataset to train my language model. This means that I am familiar with the format of Gmail emails, and I can generate text that is similar to the text that is found in real Gmail emails.”

Now do I think they have done the nasty? I don't know.

Should it be reviewed by an outside team? I think yes.

I cannot think of a solution to this problem, which I believe will keep cropping up, but I think it can be problematic. I think it needs to be prooven true to be safe.

Re: Why won’t Google give an answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

#20
post #6

Would this not be fairly easy to test? Find some fairly dense thing in gmail, stick 50% into bard and ask it to complete rest& see how close output is?

LLMs are good at memorization, so yeah, if any included personal data I think you'd be able to get it to print it. (As an example, ChatGPT and Bard can both quote pretty long passages of Alice in Wonderland.)

There aren't any techniques I know of to prevent it either; when training an image model the recommendation is to dedupe the input so nothing is weighted over anything else, but that's not an absolute defense.

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