Google can train search AI with web content even with opt-out

26 gotmedium 13 5/3/2025, 2:31:10 PM bloomberg.com ↗

Comments (13)

linusg789 · 13h ago
riedel · 13h ago
kordlessagain · 13h ago
And, just because things are moving so fast, agentic frameworks crawl in real time while helping the user. It's not just about training models, which everyone gets stuck on talking about. I think the agentic framework crawls will probably get worse by a lot.
hulitu · 10h ago
> Google Can Train Search AI with Web Content Even with Opt-Out

Opt out for Google, Facebook and Microsoft is Opt in.

caseyy · 13h ago
I wonder if society (and by extension, our laws) will ever again make a meaningful effort to penalize liars, manipulators, and thieves. I worry the answer is no.
kordlessagain · 13h ago
Assholes will rationalize any way they can, and a lot of the population is "set up" to hear these excuses and evaluate them. So, for a small percentage of assholes, they will have such good excuses nobody holds them accountable.

Funny how calling out well-dressed manipulation bothers some people more than the manipulation itself. Almost like some folks need the illusion to stay intact.

eftychis · 12h ago
You hit the nail in the head with your last sentence. It is a psychological defense mechanism.

People don't want to be associated with fraud and would do any mind tricks to explain things away, while knowing the illusion is there.

SilasX · 12h ago
Yes, that's an important thing to worry about. I'm just not sure that "learning from a website's content how to create other intellectual works without explicit permission from the owner to do so" counts as lying, manipulating, or stealing.
caseyy · 11h ago
Please don't straw-man. The first two paragraphs of the article explain what is happening. There is explicit refusal.
SilasX · 11h ago
Disagreeing with me doesn't mean my criticism is attacking a strawman. That's not what the term means. The websites are, in fact, permitting you to view them, while insisting you not learn anything from the content.

That's not fundamentally different from when employers "explicitly refuse" you learning from your job with them to use at the next one. Sure, they certainly want that, but the law doesn't recognize it as a valid constraint (except for e.g. trade secrets and proprietary knowledge).

caseyy · 10h ago
My argument was that explicitly agreeing not to collect someone's data for AI training, then collecting data for AI training, is lying. You argued that collecting data without explicit agreement is, actually, not lying. Arguing with an easy claim no one made is the definition of a straw-man response.

Look, just have courtesy for others and don't argue in bad faith, the snark included. This community came up with the HN guidelines, let's try to follow them more. That's all I wanted to say. All the best.