Google aims to update its Terms of Service (ToS), which covers over 70 products, every two years and changes in the 2024 edition address AI.
Since early 2023, Google has had a “Generative AI Additional Terms of Service” and it’s now being incorporated into the main ToS. The main addition is an AI output clause where “Google won’t claim ownership over that [generated AI] content.” The company gave us one such example: if Gemini generated a poem, you could publish it in a book without needing a license from Google.
Meanwhile, Google has expanded the ToS section about what you’re prohibited from doing: “You must not abuse, harm, interfere with, or disrupt our services or systems.” Building upon existing work to classify more things as spam, this includes:
- introducing malware
- spamming, hacking, or bypassing our systems or protective measures
- jailbreaking, adversarial prompting, or prompt injection, except as part of our safety and bug testing programs
- accessing or using our services or content in fraudulent or deceptive ways, such as:
- phishing
- creating fake accounts or content, including fake reviews
- misleading others into thinking that generative AI content was created by a human
- providing services that appear to originate from you (or someone else) when they actually originate from us
- providing services that appear to originate from us when they do not
- using our services (including the content they provide) to violate anyone’s legal rights, such as intellectual property or privacy rights
- reverse engineering our services or underlying technology, such as our machine learning models, to extract trade secrets or other proprietary information, except as allowed by applicable law
- using automated means to access content from any of our services in violation of the machine-readable instructions on our web pages (for example, robots.txt files that disallow crawling, training, or other activities)
- hiding or misrepresenting who you are in order to violate these terms
- providing services that encourage others to violate these terms
There are also country-specific changes in France and Australia. Google updates the ToS to reflect the latest laws and products. As is the case with most companies today, it uses straightforward language and is easy enough to understand.
This new ToS will take effect on May 22, 2024 and Google is emailing users about the change starting today. There are no changes to the Privacy Policy. As always, Google provides a comparison between the old and new versions.
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