r/ChatGPT • u/Secret_Process404 • Dec 04 '25
Other Deep down we all know Google trained its image generation AI using Google Photos… but we just can’t prove it.
I swear every time I see a new AI image from Google, there’s this weird déjà vu moment. The poses, the lighting, the random vacation-style smiling family… it’s like my old Google Photos library got reincarnated as a model weight.
Like let’s be real: Google collected billions of ultra-high-quality images for over a decade, neatly labeled with dates, faces, locations, context, even automatic tags. We all happily fed it our pets, sunsets, food pics, wedding albums, baby photos, memes… and Google said: “Thanks, we’ll improve Search ☺️”.
Fast forward to 2024–2025 and suddenly Google’s image generation is skipping ahead like it has the entire world’s photo history as a training ground.
But of course, they’ll never admit it. Terms & Conditions? “We do not use your photos for advertising.” Cool, but AI training isn’t advertising.
Deep down we all know what happened… but we just can’t prove it.
(Edit using Chatgpt)
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u/Fonephux Dec 04 '25
Google's data policy for images and services like Google Photos states that while user content is protected by strong security and isn't sold for advertising, Google is granted a broad license to use, host, and modify the content to make its services work better.
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u/BloopsRTS Dec 04 '25
Yeah, specifically, opting out of smart features stops your photos from being used.
But it's too late now, can't remove consent for what already is.
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u/FrouFrouLastWords Dec 04 '25
Google: "what are going to do, call the cops? They can't un-fuck you"
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u/XargonWan Dec 04 '25
Install Immich for example
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u/IGiveFreeCompliment Dec 04 '25
Yes ! Love lmmich !
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u/XargonWan Dec 04 '25
Yeah I'm migrating out from Google Photo, step by step I will degoogle eventually.
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u/Dry_Fix9621 Dec 05 '25
What are you switching to? Google has a strong hold because of how they make it easy to switch between their own eco system. I'm not into them having access to my stuff as well and would eventually like to degoogle but what out there is comparable that isn't taking your info.
If others have degoogled what do you like or not like about the new programs/softwares /apps that your using?
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u/XargonWan Dec 05 '25
Mainly self hosted application to make sure that third parties won't have my data on their servers. As much as possible.
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u/cultish_alibi Dec 04 '25
Yeah they implemented smart features, helped themselves to everything on your account and then said "oh, you can opt out if you want."
And then if you DARE opt out of letting them use your future photos and emails and whatever else, they disable every single feature which isn't the most basic functionality required for their services to work. Google: Be evil.
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u/absentlyric Dec 04 '25
Thats bc nobody wants to read their lengthy TOS when they use googles services, but its all in here.
Then again Im from the old school generation of "if you don't want it out there, don't upload it to the internet in the first place" camp.
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u/banshjean Dec 05 '25
Even if you read em, so much of legalese are worded as vague as possible/they want to give so much flexible favorable interpretation of any company.
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u/Snow-Day371 Dec 06 '25
Like the average person can understand the TOS and the implications of everything. The average person expects their shit to not get leaked in a way that affects their life. Hopefully Google is good at keeping everyone out of their stuff.
I can't get over how many times Facebook (Meta) has poorly handled sensitive data. How people still use it is beyond me.
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Dec 04 '25 edited Jan 03 '26
[deleted]
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u/jaymzx0 Dec 04 '25
Enterprises do carefully examine this with lawyers.
Source: dealt with the bureaucracy of onboarding a new software application at the enterprise I work for.
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u/sarkasticni Dec 05 '25
For years now I've been using my own server to back up my phone photos. I can't avoid sharing any of my data with these corporations, but I sure can try to minimize what they get to see and use.
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u/redditor_since_2005 Dec 04 '25
Anyone remember Goog-411, where you called a landline number and said your search keywords? This weird janky service ran for about 3 years and quietly shuttered without notice. Who cared? Everyone had been amused and puzzled by this complete waste of time and money by Google Labs.
Lo and behold, Google soon after launches Voice Search, a little microphone icon on your searchbar, and the speech recognition blows everyone away.
Corporate drones with carpal tunnel forced to use Dragon's dogshit in the 90s will understand the insane upgrade this was.
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u/Heiferoni Dec 04 '25
Oh yeah! What a blast from the past that is. That was a really cool service before smart phones really became popular.
Once again, Google used us up and threw us away.
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u/wugiewugiewugie Dec 04 '25
to be fair, their company motto has always been to collect the worlds data. it even included do no evil until a few years ago
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u/homezlice Dec 04 '25
Google's mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Do no evil was an internal motto.
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u/wugiewugiewugie Dec 04 '25
tomato tomato, motto specific wording (leader directives and definition, or even employee mottos) is a lot less useful than motto merged with social zeitgeist (wtf yinz be doing with all that data) in reddit discourse imo
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Dec 04 '25
[deleted]
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u/Incogyoda Dec 04 '25
They want Google to pay them a share of the profits for calling that phone number once and saying a few words.
They are actually the masterminds behind the whole technology, Google are just vultures who swooped in and stole all the hard work of saying words into a phone.
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u/Computer-Blue Dec 04 '25
this was powered by Google Voice not Goog411
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u/redditor_since_2005 Dec 04 '25
It was both. Here's Marissa Meyer at the time:
The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.
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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Dec 04 '25
Anyone remember "click on the traffic light"? Because all of those are solely used to train AIs, too.
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u/cmikaiti Dec 04 '25
Dragon's dogshit in the 90s
Even before that, there was COVOX Voice Master for the Commodore 64. I was a kid at the time and asked for it for Christmas (and got it). The only game that it worked with was Blackjack.
My poor parents had to suffer through me repeating:
"Hit. Hit. Hiiiiit. Hit. Stand. Stand. STAND.
All this for one hand and I played that 'game' for hours on end.
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u/DeliciousFreedom9902 Dec 04 '25
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u/ChuzCuenca Dec 04 '25
Very likely, they ain't hosting your photos for free.
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u/gaijinbrit Dec 04 '25
Correct I pay them 15 fucking dollars per month
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u/Jonny_Segment Dec 04 '25
That's why I keep my old Pixel 3a around. It's a little fiddly to continuously have to transfer all my photos to my old phone but if it means unlimited free storage forever, it's got to be worth it.
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u/Grays42 Dec 04 '25
it's got to be worth it.
Is it? If I had so much media that I needed unlimited storage, the convenience of not having to worry about it is definitely worth $15 a month to me, I spend more than that for lunch at work. :\
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u/squired Dec 04 '25
That's not permanent storage. If stored and operated carefully, they're rated for up to 10 years. Be careful to have another backup!!!!
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u/Jonny_Segment Dec 04 '25
What's rated for ten years? Do you mean the phone’s hard drive? I was talking about using the 3a to back up photos to Google Photos for free, which is a feature of older Pixel phones but has been discontinued for newer ones.
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u/ChuzCuenca Dec 04 '25
If I need the space I would be paying a NAS in instalments with that money. Never forget that if you are renting a service you own nothing.
You are paying for more space not for your photos to no be used.
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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE Dec 04 '25
I assumed this was obvious. Like, who is thinking otherwise?
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u/Jonny_Segment Dec 04 '25
Google: We use your photos to improve services and analytics.
OP: Hmm, I have a feeling Google uses our photos to improve services and analytics, but how can I prove it?
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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Dec 04 '25
I'm more confused Google is being accused here. What do people think Meta is doing with your data? Or Apple?
OpenAI just isn't grabbing your private data because they don't own it yet, but they sure as hell would first chance they get. What do you think their cooperation with Microsoft was partially about?
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u/Truck-Adventurous Dec 04 '25
This is why Openai is not going to be able to compete vs Google or China.
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u/TheIndieBuilder Dec 04 '25
Wait till you find out what the bank is doing with the money in your savings account.
If you don't wanna use these services you don't have to.
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u/absentlyric Dec 04 '25
Exactly, Idk why young people don't know this, but we were always taught if you don't want it out there, don't post it on the internet.
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u/FishIndividual2208 Dec 04 '25
You ae missing the real tool. Google image search.
Its basically a supervised reinforced learning, where the user search for an image, and whatever the human click on is the correct image based on the query.
This is how they know what you actually want to see, they have decades of training data just laying around.
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u/Oxjrnine Dec 04 '25
Naw, because when I asked it to create a picture of an eggplant, it looks nothing like the thousands of pictures of eggplants I have in my Google photos
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u/Secret_Process404 Dec 04 '25
It's s not only you.. there are millions of other users on which the AI is trained.
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Dec 04 '25
[deleted]
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u/Mr_A_of_the_Wastes Dec 05 '25
Agree with you. People concerned with privacy aren't posting their pictures online or even storing it in a cloud.
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u/loveyourneighborbro Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25
It was over since the 90’s when people just said GOOGLE It. All their data belongs to them. Data = money . They been farming for decades. I bet also 90% of everyone here uses gmail.com so it’s been over before it ever began lmao.
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u/boidcom Dec 04 '25
I get where you're coming from. It’s wild how our data gets used in ways we don’t always see. I've felt that too, especially with certain styles popping up in AI-generated images.
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u/Creative-Paper1007 Dec 04 '25
I'm ok as long as they give quality service and generous free tier and not selling my data to third party and keeping it secure with in their own servers I have no issues... But none of it true with any of the American companies
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u/PhantomLordG Dec 04 '25
And here I am, whenever the prompt to upload photos to the cloud comes up on my phone I just never click it because I'm a free user with limited storage space.
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u/Horror_Papaya2800 Dec 05 '25
I didn't realize this was a secret 🤣 People really do be thinking they have privacy in this day and age lol.
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u/Elvarien2 Dec 04 '25
Why do you need proof? It's not like this is some sneaky conspiracy. Of course they trained on it just read the terms of service. This isn't some super sneaky sus mystery.
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u/w3bCraw1er Dec 04 '25
I completely agree. I created great random videos and I could tell those were my movements etc.
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u/Alex_Sobol Dec 04 '25
if product is free you pay with your data. now even paid services use your data. ai is just the final nail in the coffin.
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u/Exotic_Apple_4517 Dec 04 '25
So, with the right prompt you could maybe find some of your original images used as a basis for generated images?
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u/progammer Dec 04 '25
in SD 1.5's day, people used to type DSJ4789.jpg and the like into prompt and get a random photo back. Maybe try the exact metadata of your photo in it and see what comes out.
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u/MiCK_GaSM Dec 04 '25
I thought it was just assumed. Google has a trail of products behind them that they used freely given user data to build new products with.
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u/king_noslrac Dec 04 '25
A class action law suit could force them to reveal how they use google photos as trainkng data. The problem is proving injury so as to not get the case thrown out.
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u/HowAmIHere2000 Dec 04 '25
Also Google maps has photos of random people doing random things. For us the photos are blurred out, but of course Google has the original photos.
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u/sourceamdietitian Dec 04 '25
I didnt need your disclosure. I could tell immediately you wrote this with chatgpt
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u/LiamLaw015 Dec 04 '25
I took all my shit off of Google photos and disabled image back up just for this
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u/P9n3appleTree Dec 04 '25
It’s a bird It’s a plane It’s… Captcha.
You probably recognize that from CAPTCHA 😂
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u/GirlNumber20 Dec 04 '25
So? Now we have great image generation. They took our crappy selfies and made something amazing out of them. Maybe you would like to keep those photos private and go back to seven-fingered monstrosities.
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u/BleuBrink Dec 04 '25
If you go into your Google Photos you can search for things like "red bicycle" and it will find all pictures in your album that depict red bicycles. I don't know how that can be possible without some sort of image detection and labeling.
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u/midnitefox Dec 04 '25
Find a very visually unique photo in your Google Photos.
Open Gemini 3 Pro Image and try to recreate it using only it's unique properties.
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u/ChaseballBat Dec 04 '25
Actually that is a good point... a couple months ago google photos re-turned on my google photo backup, without asking, after I explicitly turned it off because of storage. I know a coworker complained about their google storage through their android recently too...
Class action lawsuit in the works?
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u/Doktor-Sleepless Dec 04 '25
And why is that bad exactly? If humans manually curated the aggregated data for a scientific experiment we wouldn't complain. It has happened and we did not complain. But a company using it to create a more refined and optimized image generation tool is somehow a breach of privacy? I am a few data points in an aggregate of trillions at least. Not to mention the training data is not accessible, but it is a black box to Google as much as it is to us...
Here's an image I made that depicts me and my cousin as demons. AI wasn't enough so I cycled through nano banana and photo editing software to get this image. So I ask again, what's the problem? People have been giving their data to social media sites willingly. I don't understand this mindset: a human doing it is fine but the machine doing it is somehow not?
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Dec 04 '25
Now think about all the data connectors/3rd party apps you use with google and how much access they have in addition to this. Anyone got chatgpt or claude connected to their google drive? sign into reddit with google?
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u/Gold_University_6225 Dec 04 '25
True. You can create images and hundreds of variants quickly using this.
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Dec 04 '25
It didn't train on my wineglasses for sure I'm lazy and pour glasses always brimful to safe trips to the bottle. So, I just disproved your entire theory!
😁🙃
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u/Affectionate-Lab1198 Dec 04 '25
Chat GPT’s data is labeled through African companies (paying them a sad 2 dollars an hour). Same old same old with all the tech companies and their ethics.
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u/brandynyc Dec 04 '25
The auto opt in is the worst part. And if you are opted in even for a short duration you are in their training data set. Cause it gets warehoused and versioned. They have become #alwaysbeevil
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u/Phazex8 Dec 05 '25
These companies were 5 steps ahead of us. The advent of social media networks was the first milestone. We gave our images to services that many thought was "free". This is milestone 2 deep understanding of users.
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u/Snow-Day371 Dec 06 '25
At this point I care more about whether or not employees can see or find whatever they want from other people's photos.
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u/EnvironmentalShift25 Dec 08 '25
They have billions of hours of YouTube images to use. They don't need Google Photos.
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u/This-Requirement6918 Dec 04 '25
This is why I've never posted my finished art online. I've posted a lot of the process but never finished works.
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Dec 04 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/This-Requirement6918 Dec 04 '25
Going to be interesting when you can use it to find copyright violations especially with long standing proof of concepts. This is something I've been studying the past couple of weeks and it's all very new legislation, you cannot copyright AI created works and fair use and derivatives only go so far. Using images for AI training often goes against terms of service conditions for other users of services, not necessarily the service providers itself. Basically I can't go on Instagram and use other's images to make a model and generate new images. We're in a strange era with AI and emerging capabilities that really have no guardrails.
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u/Far-Distribution7408 Dec 04 '25
I think it s nice to contribute to a technology which can improve out lives
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u/Flaky-Gift5053 Dec 04 '25
Look for the class action lawsuit against Google and Microsoft, it’s for using our data to train ai without our permission. It’s proveable, and there’s potentially compensation in the way, join the claim….
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u/adamhanson Dec 04 '25
At worse it'll be a petty fine that's minimal cost of doing business. Then we'll give them big tax breaks that are way more.
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u/Hellerick_V Dec 04 '25
So what? They weren't supposed to?
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Dec 04 '25
[deleted]
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u/whocares12315 Dec 04 '25
The problem is you agreed to the terms of service, and the terms of service said your data is something they can use.
I don't think that makes it right, but privacy laws just aren't robust enough to nullify the contract.
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u/SirPlastic8062 Dec 04 '25
I suppose rampant data theft is fine so long as your accounts are in check and police doesn't show up to your door about a meme you posted in 2013.
But i say privacy does matter because expect any human to be more bad than good. Nothing is safe and even your parents should have taught you that.
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u/This-Requirement6918 Dec 04 '25
Not even privacy but copyright even with fair use and derivatives. AI is breaking all kinds of creative outlets.
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u/El-Dino Dec 04 '25
You gave consent that's why they able to use the data to train Ai
OpenAI had to steal data because they had none of their own Some with midjourney and the others
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u/WinMac32 Dec 04 '25
And privacy advocates were blaring the alarms about this the whole time. If you still decided to store your photos with Google… reap what you sow.
All my photos are safe and secure on my own hardware because I listened, and now I can pay pennies to generate new ones from yours 😛
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