Google wants to know your life story

Google’s Project Ellman identifies key moments in your life and answers questions about them

According to CNBC, a team at Google is purportedly investigating ways to develop a chatbot that can respond to inquiries about your private life.

The idea, named Project Ellman after biographer Richard Ellman, will utilize information from mobile phones—such as images and Google searches—to create a “birds-eye” picture of your life story: When your children were born when you went to college, and when you lived in a specific place.

As explained here, Google already owns vast amounts of personal user data from all of its products, including Google Photos. In order to discover key times in your life, Project Ellman would triangulate many data points and reorganize the data in a novel way.

According to an internal Google presentation that CNBC examined, if it finds a photo taken “exactly 10 years” after your graduation that features a number of faces it hasn’t seen in ten years, it may assume that you attended a class reunion.

It can “use knowledge from higher in the tree” to deduce who the parent(s) of a newborn in the pictures are if it recognizes a baby’s new face. It is capable of taking “unstructured context” and categorizing it into “moments” and “chapters” of our lives in this way.

“We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations, to identify a meaningful moment”, says the presentation. “When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear”.

As of this writing, Google is simply investigating this product; the location of Project Ellman’s debut has not been revealed. It might appear in a new chatbot or as an addition to the existing AI-powered capabilities in Google Photos, such as face recognition and memory slideshows.

The team demonstrated “Ellman Chat,” which could respond to private inquiries like “do you have a pet” and “what are your favorite foods” better than ChatGPT. It would use your personal information, pulled in from other Google products, as training data to create “Your Life Story Teller,” according to the presentation.

Google is spinning several AI projects; Project Ellman is only one of them.

Having an AI assistant that can easily access all of our memories and life events in one location would seem intriguing. Project Ellman does, however, bring up some important issues. One of the main privacy issues, for instance, is Google’s unauthorized access to and analysis of user information such as search histories, photographs, and location data. If users’ hopes, anxieties, relationships, and other vulnerabilities are exploited by using details of their life stories, there is also a potential for emotional manipulation. Furthermore, it might heighten concerns about the overreach of AI and the dangers of large tech companies abusing people’s data. It might also run afoul of regulations or legal issues about user control, transparency, and data protection.