Despite employees urging Google not to move forward, the tech giant has reportedly signed a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) allowing its AI models to be used for classified work.
According to The Information, citing a source familiar with the matter, the agreement gives the DoD the ability to use Google’s AI for “any lawful government purpose.”
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- erictile@lemmy.worldEnglish12 days
“But have good feelings too. Share my life with Oprah and Maya Angelou.” - Dr. Evil
- 13 days
C’mon disgruntled GOOG employee. You know what you need to do. And you can get rich with put options a few weeks before you do it.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish13 days
Protip to Google employees: if you’re going to protest, do an actual protest instead of whatever this performative crap was.
- pageflight@piefed.socialEnglish13 days
We need a lot more of them to join https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/ .
The biggest action I know of was the Women’s walkout in 2018, about 20k employees. But, no persistent action and no escalation, so no real result.
- 13 days
LMAO a hunger strike in front of companies who literally don’t give a shit if you live or die.
I think the scariest thing about Artificial Intelligence is the absolute fucking basement-dwelling, fart-sniffing, booger-eating, antisocial narcissists with zero ability to empathize with other human beings developing and “training” it. They spend their lives acting like a victim because they’re “autistic” but I have met plenty of autistic people who aren’t self-aggrandizing, narcissistic assholes, so it’s not because of the autism, it’s because they’re assholes.
We’re essentially letting AI learn socialization from the people with the least quality socialization skills and interpersonal skills available. That’s the scary part, the idiotic shit it will learn from these narcissistic fucking idiots.
- Malyca@lemmy.zipEnglish12 days
Autistic person here, this 👆 I’ve actually found it drives me in a positive direction due to sense of justice and hyper empathy, both from autism. If anything, they are fighting against that to be evil pieces of shit.
- Voroxpete@sh.itjust.worksEnglish13 days
No, that’s only allowed if you’re super wealthy or part of Trump’s cabinet. Regular people don’t get to play at the big boy table, they’ll come down on you like a hammer. Just look at the soldier who bet on Maduro getting “removed”. He’s facing charges while guys like Lutnick are making bank.
- Malyca@lemmy.zipEnglish12 days
If I ever went postal, lutnick would be near the top of my list. I won’t, but it’s nice to fantasize.
- patruelis@lemmy.worldEnglish12 days
This world becomes dystopian very quickly.
I’ve been out of Alphabet’s ecosystem for many years but trying to get my friends and family just to move on from WhatsApp or G. Search is like asking them to chew glass.
Ultimately, very few care, even fewer will boycott and almost no one who has power or influence will do anything. Sad world.
- EliteCloneMike@lemmy.zipEnglish12 days
Me too. Even after a tragedy caused by Google’s awful AI. My situation was that I uploaded old family photos in 2022, looking for photos of my best friend who passed away from cancer. A week later Google disabled my decade old account without warning in the middle of the night. No explanation. They just said “harmful content” was found and linked to a page of the most heinous accusations you could imagine. My appeal was rejected within hours. The message changed several months later to say “child abuse”, after an NYT article on the issue. Some of my family has changed their habits, but not really by a lot. Most still use Google services a lot. I am still in therapy because of the damage they caused. Some people blame me for not having a back-up. I usually did, but was in sick a sad state when I lost my friend that I want really thinking about it clearly and definitely didn’t have reason to expect anything like what they did.
Google, they report cartoon images and family photos as well. Forbes for reported on it (https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/12/20/google-scans-gmail-and-drive-for-cartoons-of-child-sexual-abuse/). They closed a biggish profile YouTube channels account for cartoons as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoki_Saito). Same for family photos/medical photos, of which there are plenty of reports from various news networks, the most prominent were probably the three from the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/technology/google-appeals-change.html, and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/27/technology/google-youtube-abuse-mistake.html). Plus more from El Pais (https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-09-19/google-closed-my-account-over-sexual-content-but-theyre-not-telling-me-what-it-is-and-ive-lost-everything.html), Buisness Insider (https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-after-years-2020-10?op=1), Android Police (https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/03/08/when-google-locks-you-out-of-your-account-begging-the-internet-for-help-is-your-first-and-last-resort/), India Times (https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-09-19/google-closed-my-account-over-sexual-content-but-theyre-not-telling-me-what-it-is-and-ive-lost-everything.html), etc. And tons of self reporting (https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/03/google-photos-false-csam-flags-users-locked-out/).
My point is that it is not black and white or as simple as don’t download it. There are plenty of cases in which a person would not know such as downloading an AI training set (https://www.404media.co/a-developer-accidentally-found-csam-in-ai-data-google-banned-him-for-it/). If they truly wanted to follow the law, it would be knowing possession that should end with a persons account being terminated. All other cases should end with maybe the file reported and deleted. But their system is highly flawed and most appeals are denied, which is nonsense when less then 1% of these reports end up with an arrest and even fewer lead to convictions (https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:pr592kc5483/cybertipline-paper-2024-04-22.pdf).
To be honest, I don’t think this is all a failure of Google or Meta or Microsoft, but the NCMEC and Thorn. They are the real threat to child safety, as they use their platform to claim to want to save children, but have other agendas (https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/08/the-many-reasons-why-ncmecs-board-is-failing-its-mission-from-a-ncmec-insider/ and https://www.jezebel.com/ashton-kutcher-thorn-sex-workers-1850852760). Plus, at least Thorn has been found to lie about their numbers of children rescued (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kutcher-software-child-trafficking/).
All Google, and the others, are doing is over reporting and making harder to find actual criminals. It hardly worth celebrating when one is caught while thousands of innocent people are being harmed. There needs to be penalties for false reports or an ability for people to reclaim their data/accounts when cleared of wrongdoing. The number of false positives is absurd and Facebook and LinkedIn researchers have both found it to be highly erroneous (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-photos-led-false-accusations-child-abuse?language=en).
I think we desperately need data privacy and data protection laws. And the “think of the children” or “I have nothing to hide” arguments against them are just trickle down ideas from these data brokers who profit heavily from invading personal data.
13 daysPretty sure Google management doesn’t give a fuck what their replaceable employees think.
- 13 days
Yeah i was thinking “oh nooo not employee backlash, what are they gonna doooo”…
Just fucking chop the fascists head off with a machete, because that actually works. Fair warning though, this is probably illegal in your state ^^
- WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish11 days
Just fucking chop the fascists head off with a machete
in minecraft, you surely mean!
- 12 days
Employees need to start figuring out that whining about it doesn’t change shit because you’re in a corporation, not a democracy. The only leverage they have is their numbers. They need to put up or shut up, the only way to stop this is for entire swaths of people to quit their jobs. Further, Google has plenty of people wealthy enough to start their own business, these people have options that a lot of others don’t. If they still care more about their paychecks than they do their ethics, I couldn’t give a fuck about their opinion that they won’t actually stand up to defend.
At least Timnit Gebru stood on principles (mostly anyway, she at least threatened to quit and they fired her), and the paper Google fired her over is more important today than when it was written in 2020. It was literally a prophetic document for all the issues we face regarding AI today.
Google pretended it fixed things by doing a lot of fake inclusivity bullshit (not that including people is bullshit, but rather Google’s methods are those weak and pointless corporate ideas of “inclusivity” are bullshit), and brushed the contents of the paper under the rug. The reality is that paper was way too on the nose of real problems for them to allow to be published as it was.
Anyway, if the employees didn’t figure it out six years ago when they shitcanned Gebru for standing up for herself (and humanity), I doubt they’ll magically figure it out now.
EDIT: typos
- floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish13 days
the only way to stop this is for entire swaths of people to quit their jobs.
There’s a middle ground: unionization and strikes. Not always successful but more effective than just complaining.
- pageflight@piefed.socialEnglish13 days
A paid, non working, in-the-press employee body is more of a drain on business than an absent one, I bet.
- 13 days
That’s definitely a path as well, but considering how smart (at least in math and computer science) you have to be to be developing AI in general. Those are not easy people to replace because of their skill levels and skillsets. Them just leaving and refusing to do the work is honestly a lot better play than trying to get everyone in the company on board for unionization. Only OpenAI is strictly an AI company. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter all have their fingers in other pies, meaning you would need to get everyone in a massive company on board. Far easier to just get all your colleagues on board and just bail to build your own thing.
- Malyca@lemmy.zipEnglish12 days
They fire the good ones and leave the shady ones. Now that’s what’s left.
- Jhex@lemmy.worldEnglish13 days
What? a corporation does not give a shit what its employees think? say it ain’t so!
It’s called Work-to-Rule, google weenies. Nut up and start letting these projects fail.
- ryper@lemmy.caEnglish13 days
Google’s bound to do more layoffs, and any employee backlash to anything is mostly going to help management make up the list.
then make a stand that gets you severance for a company you shouldn’t morally want to work at. that sounds like a win win to me
Of course they did. Does anyone expect any company, let alone one as big as Google, will do anything other than seek profit? There’s no ethics or morals in corporate America. Money and power is all they seek, employees be damned.
