We’re constantly being told that AI is coming for our jobs, our photos, our writing, our music and everything we hold dear about being creative – when we’d much rather it just helped us do the accounts and take the bins out. It’s enough to make anyone feel depressed, powerless, paranoid and a little bit angry.
More positively, however, we’ve always been encouraged to check for anyone using our images without our permission online and monitor any possible copyright infringements using Google image search. But now it appears, irony of ironies, that Google may be mining our self-same image searches to feed AI.
Its latest search history update, for which it’s launched a Search Services History tab, now stores media uploads from user interactions, including pictures used in Google Lens and reverse image searches, to train its AI. So, potentially, a tool used to protect photographers’ copyright is now being used against photographers.
Thanks, Google!
Stop the search?
Like most of us, I often find myself wondering what happens if or when us humans are minded to stopping posting the fruits of our creativity online for AI to mine? Does AI then endlessly regurgitate itself until nothing is ever ‘real’?
While Google has long retained text-based search queries, its data collection expanding into visual media raises age-old questions regarding privacy and ownership. Since it is a default setting for those with search history enabled, potentially millions of us may be contributing to Google’s AI ‘arms race’ without realising. It’s one thing to mine publicly available images on the Internet but another thing entirely to drill into user uploads or search requests.
It’s almost enough to make anyone want to go back to an age where we all had to get our images developed and printed to claim personal ownership.
Fortunately, back in the real world, if AP readers want to prevent Google from storing and analysing personal images and searched media for training, there is the ability to opt out in privacy settings. This can be done by signing into your Google account, navigating to the ‘My Activity’ page, locating the Search Services History tab, and unchecking the ‘Save Media’ box below it.
You can now go back to choosing when, where and with whom to share your images.
What do AP readers think? Have the tech giants got so big and so entrenched in our creative lives that our images and skillsets can be freely mined with impunity? Are you happy with that, or are we simply fretting too much? Let us know.
Related reading:
- Warning: Google may delete all your photos
- Adobe and Google partner up to bring Adobe Firefly to Google Bard
- Is this ‘art’ fair? Sale of AI generated ‘imagining’ of iconic Ansel Adams photo at New York art fair generates its own controversy
via TheTechBuzz.
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