Google Weighs Gemini AI Project To Tell People Their Life Story Using Their Photos and Searches (cnbc.com) 18
The Gemini LLMs developed by Google Deepmind can process more than text, including images, video and audio. So a team at Google has proposed using AI to create a "bird's-eye" view of users' lives, reports CNBC, "using mobile phone data such as photographs and searches."
Dubbed "Project Ellmann," after biographer and literary critic Richard David Ellmann, the idea would be to use LLMs like Gemini to ingest search results, spot patterns in a user's photos, create a chatbot and "answer previously impossible questions," according to a copy of a presentation viewed by CNBC. Ellmann's aim, it states, is to be "Your Life Story Teller."
It's unclear if the company has plans to produce these capabilities within Google Photos, or any other product. Google Photos has more than 1 billion users and 4 trillion photos and videos, according to a company blog post... A product manager for Google Photos presented Project Ellman alongside Gemini teams at a recent internal summit, according to documents viewed by CNBC. They wrote that the teams spent the past few months determining that large language models are the ideal tech to make this bird's-eye approach to one's life story a reality. Ellmann could pull in context using biographies, previous moments and subsequent photos to describe a user's photos more deeply than "just pixels with labels and metadata," the presentation states...
"We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment," a presentation slide reads. "When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear...." The team also demonstrated "Ellmann Chat," with the description: "Imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?"
Reached for a comment, a Google spokesperson told CNBC that Google Photos "has always used AI to help people search their photos and videos, and we're excited about the potential of LLMs to unlock even more helpful experiences.
"This was an early internal exploration and, as always, should we decide to roll out new features, we would take the time needed to ensure they were helpful to people, and designed to protect users' privacy and safety as our top priority."
It's unclear if the company has plans to produce these capabilities within Google Photos, or any other product. Google Photos has more than 1 billion users and 4 trillion photos and videos, according to a company blog post... A product manager for Google Photos presented Project Ellman alongside Gemini teams at a recent internal summit, according to documents viewed by CNBC. They wrote that the teams spent the past few months determining that large language models are the ideal tech to make this bird's-eye approach to one's life story a reality. Ellmann could pull in context using biographies, previous moments and subsequent photos to describe a user's photos more deeply than "just pixels with labels and metadata," the presentation states...
"We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment," a presentation slide reads. "When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear...." The team also demonstrated "Ellmann Chat," with the description: "Imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?"
Reached for a comment, a Google spokesperson told CNBC that Google Photos "has always used AI to help people search their photos and videos, and we're excited about the potential of LLMs to unlock even more helpful experiences.
"This was an early internal exploration and, as always, should we decide to roll out new features, we would take the time needed to ensure they were helpful to people, and designed to protect users' privacy and safety as our top priority."
My career path laid bare (Score:5, Funny)
Fabulous! If they set this thing loose, and they use it to write my obituary, I'm going to be remembered by posterity as the definitive biographer of Margot Robbie's bikini-clad ass.
Oh jeez, here we go again (Score:2)
Great idea to get data! (Score:2)
I mean, the best data is the one the usual morons not only allow you to take, but actively give to you!
Might be ever so slightly amusing (Score:2)
but I'm waiting for AI to do useful stuff
Read every scientific paper ever written and find previously unseen insights and connections, especially across disciplines
Be the perfect customer support bot that knows every detail about every problem a product has and also every effective solution
Read every law book ever written and find mistakes and contradictions while also allowing people to get a straight answer to the question "is this legal?"
Run accurate simulations of the effects of a law before it's passed
Re:Might be ever so slightly amusing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
AI is already doing plenty of useful stuff. In the low end we have the cucumber sorter and lego sorter. On the other end we have AlphaFold2 which advanced science possibly more than any human ever has.
If you talking only about the chatbots, we have a nice example on ChatGPT being used to play minecraft. That itself is not very useful, but the method they used is very interesting and could possibly used to solve real problems. Other than that, it is pretty good at writing summaries. I don't know about copyri
Can't wait (Score:2)
"using mobile phone data such as photographs and searches."
Making you look like a pervert if it includes your porn searches, which, let's be honest, are more than half of all searches.
Hard Pass (Score:4, Interesting)
Parts of my life were shit. I do NOT want to remember them, at all.
It's bad enough that Google Photos was insisting to show me "memories" from back then. There was no way to add a filter saying "don't show me shit from more than 5 years ago".
As for why don't I delete those pictures, they are still history, just history I don't want shoved into my face every day.
No (Score:2)
No. No. NO. NO!
How many times do I have to repeat myself?
RUBES (Score:2)
Google has fined you 10 google e-bucks for looking too long at an apple product.
Time for a new browser plugin (Score:3)
The only thing it does is send random searches at Google.
Who needs this? (Score:2)
Who needs a summary of their life story? I know mine, since I lived it. Is this for amnesiacs?
This is just an advanced form of "let us access all your Facebook data and we'll tell you what breed of dog you would be."
Re: (Score:2)
> Who needs a summary of their life story?
The advertisers, of course!
Title. (Score:2)
Owns a dingo (Score:2)
Who do I blame? Each of us is the product of competing elements of nature and nuture (I think nuture demands more nonsensical and in some respects, dishonest behaviours): If it's intelligent (and all-knowing), it can tell me who hindered my development to adulthood (Obviously, not a lot of choices.), who should've worked more at teaching me "normal".
Pain and suffering define us: How many people take photographs in those moments? How many share them with the world? Between the "you can do it" and "worl
Everything about my life? Not a chance (Score:2)
"Imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?"
Much of my life was before digital cameras, so this system would know next to nothing about my life and I would have no desire to ask it anything.