# AI battles for supremacy, Google hoards "data"

By [taptap](https://paragraph.com/@tiptap) · 2023-07-04

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Data, one of the three key elements of AI technology development, has been the focus of the tech giants' "battle" in this "war of the gods" over AI.

On July 1, Google updated its privacy policy, making it clear that the company reserves the right to access content posted online by users to train its AI tools.

The update to Google's privacy policy reads as follows:

Google will use information to improve our services and develop new products, features, and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we will use publicly available information to help train Google's AI models and build products and features such as Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI.

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/4b736ca13e6339faa0971520c026bf8a19aac8c15d267e905485be038ab20080.png)

By way of comparison, in the previous version of Google's privacy policy, Google only mentioned that the data would be used for "language models" and not "artificial intelligence models.

Media analysis suggests that this privacy policy provision is a significant departure from previous policies, which typically described how companies would use information posted by users on the company's own servers. But in this one clause, Google appears to reserve the right to collect and use all data posted on public platforms as if the entire Internet were the company's own AI playground.

Previously, although anyone could see what was publicly posted online, the way that information was being used was changing. The public's focus on data is shifting from who has access to it to how it is used.

Google's Bard and ChatGPT may have long ago used blog posts you've forgotten about or restaurant reviews from years ago to train themselves. Google did not immediately comment on the public's concerns about privacy.

Google shows good faith to 'water sellers'

In addition to Google's users, data providers are the ones Google has to "please" if it wants to hoard "data".

Data providers are seen as the "water sellers" in the AI era.

Musk didn't want to be AI data whoring, restricting access and causing Twitter to go down. The same is true of Reddit, the U.S. posting bar that doesn't want to be whoring data, and paid APIs have come in. Directly led to several very popular third-party Reddit app offline. This shows the AI era "water sellers" to their own "water" protection.

And Google has taken the lead in showing its goodwill to the "water sellers". The data of large news publishers is naturally the first focus.

In recent months, the debate around AI copyright issues has never stopped, exacerbating the already tense relationship between large technology companies and the publishing community. And Google has taken the lead in stating that it is willing to pay for news content.

Citing a newspaper group executive, the media said Google has worked out a deal to pay for news content in the future:

AI fight, Google hoarding "data" "Google has developed a licensing agreement, they are willing to accept the principle that they need to pay to buy content, but we have not yet discussed the amount. The Google side said that negotiations on the amount will take place in the coming months, which is the first step." In response to the report, Google clarified that the reports of a licensing agreement were "inaccurate," adding that "it's still early days and we're continuing to work with the ecosystem, including news publishers, to get their input."

According to Google, they are in "ongoing dialogue" with news organizations in the U.S., U.K. and Europe, while their AI tool Bard is also being trained to "make information publicly available," which could include sites that require payment.

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*Originally published on [taptap](https://paragraph.com/@tiptap/ai-battles-for-supremacy-google-hoards-data)*