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Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

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Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#181

Post by prepend »

elric wrote: post #28
xrd wrote: post #19

About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…

I fully share your concerns. And I don't understand how apparently tons of Teams and email conversations can be archived and sold without any kind of scrutiny. How can such data be sold without the consent of all involved parties? What gives Google the right to use it to train LLMs? Is that just a way of washing away the legal protections?

Since it’s work communications, consent was already given.

When you join a company, you typically sign an agreement that talks about how the company owns all your output. Thumbs upping a Teams message is work output and they own it.

Every email sent and received. Every keystroke. Etc etc etc.

If you don’t want your employer to log and sell it, start your own company. Or use a personal device. I do the latter.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#182

Post by vkou »

girvo wrote: post #173
limagnolia wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can argue that its a bad deal, shouldn't be allowed period, etc. But that is a different argument than saying that there is no scrutiny.

The argument is that the scrutiny is in practice not sufficient, as usual in these cases.

The argument generally doesn't demonstrate that. The argument generally goes:

1. Google could do it.

2.

3. Therefore, Google is doing it!

(Step 2 needs to be filled in a bit for it to be a good argument. Generally, analogies don't quite make the cut.)

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#183

Post by WarmWash »

hogs_get_fat wrote: post #88
greggoB wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very much weirder out by it, yeah. Seems some societies are just excessively desperate for some kind, any kind, of fuel for economic growth, to the point this is where attention is now. The term "post capitalism" being thrown around feels less ridiculous than it did in years gone past.

Truth is even weirder. plenty of growth is possible but modern liberal democracy requires that all progress must be contingent on the production of enormous amounts of text that nobody would ever read. 3 years ago, the Wall Street journal covered a company trying to use AI to generate documents required for the approval of new nuclear reactor reactor designs, which sounds dangerous, until you get to the point where t…

Well that's why a plan can take years to be approved.

There also is the liability angle, where no one necessarily reads the document until the document is relevant to some situation in the future. Then you better have that document on hand.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#184

Post by [deleted] »

anon373839 wrote: post #99
budman1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI? 90% of e-mails and Teams communications are inane. Polite banter, "thanks for taking care of that, I appreciate it" "please route the forms to Janet this week because Bill is on vacation" "unit will be un available until the parts come in" . I can't see the intrinsic fact value of this kind of communicat…

> How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI? I have a hunch what this is for. AI companies want to make bigger inroads into nontechnical work settings. But LLM progress outside of fields where verifiable rewards for RL post-training can be synthetically generated (coding, math) has been pretty flat. Buying years of operational data from a company…

[deleted]

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#185

Post by xp84 »

limagnolia wrote: post #165
jordanb wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"De-identified" data is trivially easy to re-identify, especially by google. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/a-face-is-expo...

Sure, you can argue that its a bad deal, shouldn't be allowed period, etc. But that is a different argument than saying that there is no scrutiny.

Sounds like a case of “there’s not enough scrutiny unless the decision ends up agreeing with my position”

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#186

Post by dist-epoch »

budman1 wrote: post #72
Ekaros wrote: post #18

Anyone else somewhat weirded by current state of affairs that this sort of information is valuable enough to even bother selling... And that it actually happens... It feels like some societies are in really weird place.

How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI? 90% of e-mails and Teams communications are inane. Polite banter, "thanks for taking care of that, I appreciate it" "please route the forms to Janet this week because Bill is on vacation" "unit will be un available until the parts come in" . I can't see the intrinsic fact value of this kind of communicat…

This data shows exactly how a huge company of thousands of employees works and coordinates.

The perfect data to train an agent swarm on how to run a company.

Maybe it's innefficient and inane, but it's how you start.

The first LLMs, GPT-1, 2, were trained on complete garbage, the average document from the common crawl is random non-sense, yet they worked, and now we can use LLMs to filter the data for the next training run.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#187

Post by vkou »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #112
tiahura wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Mass automated data collection and automated analysis are probably the biggest threat to freedom in the present day.

And here I was thinking that flooding the zone with fascist bullshit, an office that's entirely above scrutiny, and their violent, unaccountable private army was the biggest threat to it.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#188

Post by ajross »

xrd wrote: post #19

About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…

I'm not sure I follow your argument. The privacy abuse already happened. The data is already there. And it was the airline that did it, not a tech giant who just wants to train a bunch of MLs.

Surely if this is the scenario you're worrying about, and you accept the lack of regulatory protections, Google buying Spirit's data is a good thing, right? Much better them than the airlines who you already know to be corrupt?

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#189

Post by l3x4ur1n »

6DM wrote: post #140
dgellow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything that can legally be done against this? It feels like a breach of consent. Like, it cannot be that when one accept their voice to be recorded for _human_ training they also accept it to be recorded for LLM training

Your comment reminded me of a funny interaction I had a week or so ago. I got a call that started with the usual automated message, "This call is being recorded." After the person joined, I pushed the record button on my iPhone, "This call is being recorded." They were surprised and asked why I'm recording. I said, "You're recording, so I'm recording too." The rep insisted that the company doesn't like this but that…

What is actually perfect, when the automated voice declares the call is being recorded, you don't have to do it again. You're legally allowed to record, because both parties were informed already and agree to it.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#190

Post by vkou »

csoups14 wrote: post #144
tiahura wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, when I watch the news I see freedom being taken away by authoritarians, not people tracking who complains about window seats, or what pizza place you like best.

How exactly do you think those authoritarians are identifying whose freedoms are to be taken away? Or do you think all of the datamining and Palantir contracts are for lolz? Two sides of the same coin.

> How exactly do you think those authoritarians are identifying whose freedoms are to be taken away?

Pretty easily. Do you look sort of like their enemy of the week?

That's all the excuse they need to grab you.

They don't actually give a shit about being accurate in that identification. Accuracy in repression isn't the goal. The goal is a visible, public show of force.

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