Key Takeaways
- Google funding AI courses raises ethical concerns about data use and potential AI abuse.
- AI training tools are problematic due to data privacy issues, ethical concerns, and potential misuse.
- Large corporations donate to charities for tax benefits and positive PR, not always for purely altruistic reasons.
It’s always smart business for large corporations to donate money to charitable organizations. For one, it provides an avenue to get a large tax write off for the amount of money they donate, further lining executives’ pockets with less money taken out of their companies’ revenue by the government in the US. It’s also good PR to show that a company is doing something positive, even if it isn’t for completely altruistic reasons. When it comes to artificial intelligence, and Google Gemini in particular, trying to teach people how to use AI products is a double-edged sword, and Google is trying to balance on the edge of that sword.
Google announced that it is directly funding AI courses for small businesses today on its blog. It will donate $10 million in funding to America’s Small Business Development Center (SBDC), which is a national network of training and resource centers aimed at assisting small business owners. Additionally, Grow with Google, Google’s in-house education initiative that has created multitudes of certificate programs, is launching an AI workshop “to help small businesses take advantage of Google’s AI-powered tools.”
Your first hit of AI
We’re a bit conflicted about this initiative from Google. While we do think that AI can be extremely beneficial for things like writing research papers and emails, there are a lot of AI-related problems that can and will come up in businesses’ pursuit of higher profits and revenue. Google also stands to gain a lot based on its all-in approach to Gemini and artificial intelligence by ensuring that more businesses utilize AI for their operations, specifically tools created by Google. Does this mean that Google’s $10-million funding for the SBDC, or Google’s $75-million AI Opportunity Fund from April, is immoral or only self-serving? Not necessarily. The truth often lies in the middle.
There are a lot of problems with artificial intelligence training tools nowadays, specifically with how LLMs are initially built. We’ve seen loads of examples of companies using our personal data to train their AI models, even when we never consented to that in the first place. Google reportedly was willing to pay “lump sums of cash” to record labels to help train its AI music tools in the summer, and while that’s better than directly calling into question fair use doctrines with YouTube videos, it’s still questionable. AI has a long way to go before it is intrinsically in all of our lives, and it’s currently ripe for abuse.
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