WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.
Ah, but what if I use a British accent? Got em
We use AI models processed on-device
If it's opt-in, and the processing is done on-device, then I have no reason to be outraged.
But the skeptic in me asks "what's in it for google?".
This is common for companies that like to hire PhDs.
PhDs like to work on interesting and challenging projects.
With nobody to reign them in, they do all kinds of cool stuff that makes no money (e.g. Intel Optane and transactional memory).
Designing a realtime scam analysis tool with resource constraints is interesting enough to be greenlit but makes no money.
Once released, they'll move on to the next big challenge, and when nobody is there to maintain their work, it will be silently dropped by Google.
I'm willing to bet more than 70% of the Google graveyard comes from projects like these.
With nobody to reign them in, they do all kinds of cool stuff
And they never ever ask themselves "Is this ethically the right thing to do". And so they create things that do way more harm for society than good. For selfish reasons, just because it is a "fun" project. And I'm sure management figures they will profit one way or another the more they control everything thru their AIs they shove on people.
I may be biased (PhD student here) but I don't fault them for being as such. Ethics is something that 1) requires formal training 2) requires oversight 3) contains to are different to every person. Quite frankly, it's not part of their training, never been emphasized as part of their training, and subjective based on cultural experiences.
What is considered unreasonable risk of harm is going to be different to everybody. To me, if the entire design runs locally and does not collect data for Google's use then it's perfectly ethical. That being said, this does not prevent someone else from adding the data collection features. I think the original design of such a system should put in a reasonable amount of effort in stopping that. But if that is done then there's nothing else to blame them about. The moral responsibility lies with the one who pulled the trigger.
Should the original designer have anticipated this issue thus never took the first step? Maybe. But that depends on a lot of circumstance that we don't know so it's hard to predict anything meaningful.
As for the more "harm than good" analysis, I absolutely detest that sort of reasoning since it attempts to quantify social utility in a pure mathematical sense. If this reasoning holds, an extreme example would be justifying harm to any minority group as long as it maximizes benefit for society. Basically Omelas. I believe a good quantitative reasoning would be checking if harm is introduced to ANY group of people, as long as that's the case the whole is considered unethical.
Like always, google is doing things for free to get training data.
All things are going into an authoritarian direction which needs control of the opposition. Google will have the infrastructure to identify people with opposing mindsets. There won't be a rebellion if the rebel leaders can be locked up in time.
All things are going into an authoritarian direction which needs control of the opposition.
Now that we don't have a real president anymore Google started including white house announcements in Google News. I know every one of these is written by an idiot who is not qualified for their job so I turned them off. But why the fuck didn't they do this back when we actually had a real president and these announcements were legitimate newsworthy information? The announcements of a real president were never considered newsworthy information but the babblings of a traitorapist with the mind of a 13 year old are? Fuck you google!
They get a new feature to boast about
Give me call screening and filtering options so we can ignore the calls in the first place
Deciding to install GrapheneOS is constantly validated for me! But I never want to give Google money ever again.
In some countries and, (if not mistaken) states in USA, if an AI is listening to a conversation, both parties must be made aware. If they don't notify the other end, they'll be violating regulations. Privacy erosion and manipulation likelihood aside, this is a terrible idea.
Spam protection is turned on automatically, and you’ll be notified when this happens. You can turn it off anytime in your settings:
Open Google Messages . At the top right, tap your Profile picture or Initials.
Tap Messages settings and then Spam protection. You'll only find "Spam protection" if it's available on your device. Turn Enable spam protection on or off.
I'm not seeing in my message settings. Anyone else?
They said it's rolling out in beta. Spam Protection is already in the Messages app. Scam Protection is coming soon. But to listen to telephone audio that means they want to add it into the native dialer\phone app. Google has a dialer app named "Phone" with a Spam filter feature currently.
I assume that's what is coming -- a.i. into the dialer\phone app.
If enabled, Scam Detection will beep at the start and during the call to notify participants the feature is on. You can turn off Scam Detection at any time, during an individual call or for all future calls.
Scammers will quickly catch on then the real trick will be to just play that beep without any of the ai stuff.
The beep is legal compliance, because some states require notification of call recording. Same reason you hear "this call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes".
is this really official? seems like a fake site
Híjole
If people need to be warned that they might be scammed by someone with an Indian voice asking them for gift cards, I think that they should be reclassified as AI mounts instead of people at that point.
People do become more senile as they get older, but they need to recognize it as well as prepare ahead of it in time. Who knows, maybe being an AI pet mount then wouldn't be so bad, as long as it was with an offline localized LLM-like AI vetted openly and widely, not the transparent excuse for abuse this is.
More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024.
Bullshit.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
