AI using your writing to train.
Hey writerly friends! Here's your warning that Google is making updates to terms and service allowing them to mine your data and train AI with it. It's focused on emails right now but Google docs facing a similar change is on the horizon.
Keep your eyes peeled for terms of service updates because you've already accepted future changes once you hit accept the first time. Unpublished novels do not have the same copyright protections as published novels and lawsuits are much more difficult to win. I would highly recommend anyone with a large amount of writing in Google docs start removing it from that platform.
If you don't want your writing used to train AI (and to be clear you won't be paid for it) then it's time to start looking at alternatives to Google Docs.
Some thoughts on alternatives
Microsoft Word - unlikely to implement AI training
Microsoft Word is possibly the safest bet at the moment. The Office suite makes most of it's money from corporate licensing. That depends heavily on strict privacy rules. The risk to their reputation is too high to even attempt it on just the personal version of Word. If you want to be very very cautious, get Word Professional as there is ZERO chance of it being used for AI scraping.
$159.99 USD one time purchase OR subscription model for $69.99 per year which comes with all of the Microsoft Office suite and significantly more cloud storage.
Microsoft Word Professional is $439.99 USD. You really don't need it for writing.
Scrivener - unlikely to implement AI training
Scrivener would probably not survive the kind of controversy AI scraping would cause as their customers are exclusively writers.
$59.99 USD one time purchase per platform (if you switched from windows to mac you would need to repurchase.)
Libre Office - read all the terms and conditions or don't risk it.
Libre Office has an AI tool. There are no stories circulating about them scraping user's data but they're not near as big as Google and may not have drawn enough attention yet.
Free! (Which unfortunately makes data scraping more likely.)
Also don't forget:
Platforms like Ao3, Wattpad, Smashwords and possibly even Tumblr are all being targeted by AI companies for data scraping. In fact OpenAI are being sued for doing just that.
Be careful where you post your writing.
That's all folks!
