by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
There is nothing short of panic on Tik-Tok from writers like me who use Google Docs. A number of people have Tik-Tok have urgently suggested that all writers take all of their writing off of Google Docs immediately and use Word instead (or whatever.)
I find this very curious for a number of reasons.
I understand where these writers are coming from, and, yet, I’ve actually looked into the scraping Google is doing and it seems a little too late to worry about such things. Now only is AI everywhere now, but I just don’t know how much my writing is going to make a difference if Google is scraping the entirety of Google Docs to train their LLMs.
Some of the hysterical talk on Tik-Tok seems just that — hysterical doom shit that assumes there’s some way to prevent, completely one’s words from somehow, someway being used to train LLMs.
But I will at amit that I just don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe if I just turn to Word I can somehow, magically, prevent anything I write from finding itself in the maw of AI.
At the moment, I’m taking a very measured wait-and-see approach. While I understand that if I keep my writing on Google Docs that it may, in some way, influence Google’s LLMs, it’s not like my, specific writing and ideas are going to magically pop up somewhere and be produced by Google Movies.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s exactly what is going to happen. I just don’t know at the moment.
