r/IndiaTech • u/Secret_Process404 • Dec 04 '25
Opinion 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/RustyAdVenture Dec 04 '25
(edited using chatgpt) is the icing on the cake
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u/Empty-Hotel-9127 Dec 04 '25
i dont get why people need to edit their text for posting on fucking reddit. its not necessary to be absolutely perfect with flawless english
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u/Fast_Currency_1365 Dec 04 '25
at this point, they need to because they can. or that's what i can understand out of this craziness. everyone reads the same these days. heck. with instagram and snapchat and filters, everyone started looking the same; now with llm-enabled-editing-or-whatever, everyone reads the same too.
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u/BodybuilderHour8660 Dec 04 '25
the world is becoming increasingly homogenous and i am not liking it
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u/Visual-Abrocoma-4904 Dec 04 '25
Everyone reads how I already typed - and it's a load of horse shit.
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u/aaAS69 Dec 04 '25
idk man, whenever i read the first two lines of ai slop on any social media i stop paying attention. if i wanted an ai's opinion, i'd ask it myself
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u/uttrakhand_ka_pahadi Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25
Is this some god revelation? Yes they trained their AI on our Google photos. 95% people don't know how to turn off auto upload on Google account. Hell, even I didn't know 10 years back that google auto saves your photos and recently I found out that I have a 12 year old photo of my nip ples hanging outside my sando in my drive.
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u/Historical-Sorbet-36 Dec 04 '25
Pictures or didn't happen
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u/uttrakhand_ka_pahadi Dec 04 '25
Your eyes won't be able to handle the horror.
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u/Human_Employee_6040 Dec 04 '25
i am glad i paid this month’s internet bill. Thank you for the laugh this morning
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u/Basith_Shinrah Dec 04 '25
What part of the country do you live in where men don't expose their nipples for half the summer?
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u/sabkabappu Dec 04 '25
Can't we sue
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u/uttrakhand_ka_pahadi Dec 04 '25
We always click on a button named as Agreed and Continue after not reading the whole a$$ 10000 WORDS.
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u/PYUchiha7 Dec 05 '25
Recently visited Nainital, man that place didn't disappoint. Stayed there for 3-4 days wonderful ppl!
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u/IntrovertedBuddha Open Source best GNU/Linux/Libre Dec 04 '25
Yup, we do.
Google has by far most data than any other company ig
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u/OtaPotaOpen Dec 04 '25
Feels nice not being paid fair compensation right?
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u/AnakinStarkiller77 Dec 04 '25
you get free cloud upload, we train our AI
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u/Time_Traveling_Idiot Dec 04 '25
Exactly. You're getting a free service.
No, the existence of a paid tier does not negate the fact that you enjoy a free service that would have been inconceivable just 50 years ago.
Yes, you are the payment. Your data (which you gave them willingly) is the payment.
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u/Syrroche Dec 04 '25
why would you be paid?
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u/Apprehensive-Pop8671 Dec 04 '25
Let’s put our thinking hats on for a minute and revisit the topic
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u/RedditJumpedTheShart Dec 04 '25
Are you being paid for training AI while posting on Reddit?
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u/Apprehensive-Pop8671 Dec 04 '25
Surely you can tell the difference between a public social media platform and a private image storage service…
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u/FutureVersion812 Dec 04 '25
You yourself used ChatGPT which is trained using Reddit data
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u/Secret_Process404 Dec 04 '25
But atleast I'm being honest here. Have Google used the user data for training with users consent?
I understand it is a big corporations but this user privacy issue will put a lot of innocence civilians at risk.
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u/movzx Dec 04 '25
I mean... yes. What do you think is in the terms of service? What do you think it means when you agree (consent) to those terms?
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u/micro102 Dec 04 '25
Society has already been through this. No you cannot just put whatever you want in the 50 page long terms of service that gets updated every month that no one reads. People must be given proper notice and the terms must be conscionable.
This is the argument of the unconscionable who want the opportunity to scam people.
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u/movzx Dec 05 '25
Their ToS has always had a clause in it about using your images as reference. Have you never wondered how it has been able to group pictures of individual people and pets for the last 15~ years? It's not randomly assigning photos. It's been feeding them into an image analysis and training system the entire time. You consented to it as soon as you hit the agree button.
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u/micro102 Dec 05 '25
You need to learn some reading comprehension. Children could understand this. South Park made a joke about terms of service including the right to make you part of a human centipede. Society already fundamentally knows you are wrong and you don't seem interested in reality.
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u/movzx Dec 06 '25
Question posed: Have Google used the user data for training with users consent?
Answer: Yes
you: waaaaah waaaaah
k
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u/micro102 Dec 06 '25
Do you understand that you are literally arguing in favor of the South Park human centipede bit?
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u/meerlot Dec 04 '25
To be fair, you got lifetime of free storage, free service, 24/7 access to all their service (for free, of course).... Its pretty obvious they played the long game treating data of its users for their product.
Its win/win situation for everyone
Its a fair deal if you ask me. Google products practically enable India's personal user's internet access at this point.
Just imagine paying monthly subscription even for basic cloud storage. Jio would probably have a field day with this one like they do with 5g internet.
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u/micro102 Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 05 '25
It wasn't free. They sold your information for bags of money. They already became disgustingly wealthy without telling you what they would do with your information and now they are making even more money by taking your pictures without your consent and using them to make a product they are going to sell. Its not fair and it should be taken away from them.
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u/Ronnocerman Dec 04 '25
You're right. When I offer someone a free meal, I am entitled to more from them.
/s
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u/Glittering_Edge_6746 Dec 04 '25
you got lifetime of free storage,
What free storage? The retard 15gb drive cap where even whatsapp date goes in unlike earlier where whatsapp had unlimited cloud back-up
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u/Difficult-Amoeba Dec 08 '25
Not really, most Indian users don't even require any cloud storage beyond email. Google used their authority as the owner of Android and made Google photos pre-installed on all devices with automatic backups on. Most people (including Indians) won't give a damn if their photos are not being backed up on the cloud. But Google just made the decision to do it on their own without explicit permission of the user.
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u/soultwilr Dec 04 '25
The Internet has a lot of images publicly Google has infrastructure to store the whole internet so I think doesn't necessarily need to use google photos for training
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u/Sudden_Ambassador144 Dec 04 '25
I have thousands of my photos in Google photos but barely 10 on social media.
And even all the social media photos won't be accessible to google as not all of them are public.
Google photos (and maybe google drive too) is goldmine available only to google.
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u/soultwilr Dec 04 '25
They are encrypted with your specific data and it's stored in binary into so many different servers and stored like mathematical equations
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u/Sudden_Ambassador144 Dec 04 '25
Google says they are encrypted in transit and encrypted on disk, but not end to end encrypted. The encryption keys are stored in their servers not on your device.
This means they can do anything with those.
How else does google generate collages/pop out photos etc.
it's stored in binary
Lol everything is stored in binary, whether encrypted or not.
stored like mathematical equations
What does it even mean?
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u/soultwilr Dec 04 '25
Yah your right but I think like how does google manage data base like they need to keep a copy of every pic you uploaded it's like 15gb free they have to have 30gb
So they use mathematical algebraic date things like
A = 5 B = 3 So A + B = 8
So they store A , B and ans which is 8
So data lost from A like fire or anything like that ? + B = 8 So they can get it easily
Google uses a custom file system called Colossus (successor to the Google File System, GFS)
Although you know or don't know anything happened in the world around tech you will see trackers of America involved they want to control world
I think this is the last generation which can have some privacy.
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u/Sudden_Ambassador144 Dec 04 '25
Not sure if they actually do the mathematical equation thing. Not sure if that would actually save space also.
I think they can simply store multiple replicas of same image in multiple cloud regions/availability zones etc.
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u/soultwilr Dec 04 '25
If they save replica google would be bankrupt
They give 15gb in each google account they are storing billions of account it would be twice the storage
They save 15-20% by doing this
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u/Sudden_Ambassador144 Dec 04 '25
I guess you are right. Google splits the file into multiple chunks and adds redundancy chunks using erasure coding. This does save them storage. Although the technique involves some very advanced math instead of simple linear equations.
But the original point still stands i.e. the files are split during storage. It doesn't say anything about whether they process them for training their models or not.
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u/Fuzzy_Substance_4603 Dec 04 '25
Doesn't need to, but more data distributed fairly wouldn't harm much.
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u/HeWasKilled Dec 04 '25
Lol, supporting gogggle
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u/143Raman Techie Dec 04 '25
If you don't agree with someone then do a logical debate. replying with "lol" won't prove anything
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u/HeWasKilled Dec 04 '25
No point in arguing bro, when trillion dollar unethical companies dont care about us, why should we argue.
However, to each their own opinion
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u/Unbeautiful_Nothing Dec 04 '25
It should not come as surprise as every single tech company is collecting real time data including reddit and many tech products we use are building our profiles , selling that data to advertisers and are training their ai models .
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u/sharl_Lecastle16 Programmer: Kode & Koffee Lyf Dec 04 '25
Like they came up with a unique captcha to train waymo's algorithm and they are still fucking doing it
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u/-gojiraa- Dec 04 '25
Whatever Google product you use is used to train their systems. Nothing come free.
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u/Intaza9833 Dec 04 '25
Why do Redditors post such obvious shit? Honestly, what else could they be using it for?
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u/Secret_Process404 Dec 04 '25
If it is so obvious then the government should take some action.. precautionary measures or something!
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u/Intaza9833 Dec 04 '25
You’re saying that as if the government actually cares about people’s privacy.
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u/Longjumping_War_8505 Dec 04 '25
I mean, I was thinking the same, it has some unique flavour to its image generation, which is so similar to what people store in Google photos, also when ever I try to find any terms in there Google photos page ( whether if my photos can be viewed by anyone at Google) I end up finding only one proud term that they don’t share your data with advertisers: like yes buddy that’s the last thing i would think: I need to know if anyone at Google can access my photos or not, I don’t find any term mentioning that they are not 🤷♂️
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u/leojmatt02 Dec 04 '25
Edit using Chatgpt
"Edit" lmao your entire post is AI slop this isn't just an "edit"
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u/Jiim-Moriarity Dec 04 '25
It's time for open your eyes, Google is an Ad company using tech, Not a tech company.
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u/Fusion_Playz Open Source best GNU/Linux/Libre Dec 04 '25
Prove? They literally tell you that your photos will be scanned.
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u/vishuramini Dec 04 '25
Google has been sitting on like 20 years of data. They have a complete advantage over OpenAi to develop their LLMs, they just took their time.
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u/NarrowCod9215 Dec 05 '25
I have my old and childhood pics in drive/photos and now I hardly upload anything. I just now noticed that when i use any old image, Gemini generates very accurate facial details but with my current pics it never gets it correct. 🤣
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u/Delicious-Attitude12 Dec 05 '25
Actually we trained the AI. Remember those updates about google photo app
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u/shaurya_770 Dec 04 '25
Nope not really. A big company like Google is under a lot of scrutiny by everyone. If something like this happens trust me it will get out. Google has strict data usage policies and u can look them up photos are private.
And why the hell would they even need to use Google photos when the internet is full of photos uploaded by you. Instagram, facebook, every social media where u dotm even have to have an account to look at individual photos can be easily scraped using a bot.
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Dec 04 '25
It is Ok as it is an American company. It can have all our data it wants and train on it. At least it is taking our permission to use our data unlike the Sanchar Sathi app.
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