Creator Weekly: Google Duet AI; YouTube Community Guidelines Warnings; AdSense Shocking Content Policy

Happy September! This week Google announced more AI tools for Google Workspace communication and creation apps, YouTube Community Guidelines warnings will now expire if you do policy training, AdSense shocking content policy makes some exceptions for game play imagery, and more.

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AdSense and AdMob Policy Update: More Gameplay Imagery Allowed

On August 30 Google Publisher Restrictions were updated to make some exceptions for gameplay imagery in the Shocking Content policy. This affects AdSense, AdMob and Ad Manager publishers.

If you use gameplay images on your website or blog, now some violent imagery can be monetized with Google Ads.

Get all the details:
AdSense Policy Update: Gameplay imagery exception to Shocking content publisher restrictions

Google Cloud Next: All About the AI

This week was Google Cloud Next, Google’s annual conference focused on their services for businesses, data analytics, . And, not surprisingly, generative AI was at the forefront.

Google announced updates to its suite of work and collaboration tools, including Meet meetings, Chat chat, Slides presentations and Docs documents (creatively naming products isn’t one of Google’s strengths).

Everything announced at Google Cloud Next ‘23
Watch the full Google Cloud Next keynote

Duet AI “The Future of Work”

Duet AI is Google’s “AI real-time collaborator” for its Workspace and Cloud products.

It is now a paid add-on for Google Workspace Enterprise editions.
That will put the AI tools out of the reach of many users.

However, you can sign up for Workspace Labs with your personal Google account to try out many of the AI features for free. Workspace Labs is available in US English in almost 200 countries, but appears to exclude the EU. Note that Google has not shared whether any of the newly announced AI features will be added to Workspace labs.

Google Docs

Generate text based on your prompts or rewrite existing text. Learn more.
Summarize your document.
Duet AI only: Use Proofread to check grammar, spelling or get style suggestions. Learn more.

Gmail

Create or refine draft emails based on your prompts. Learn more.
New feature: Enhanced smart reply to “draft longer personalized replies with a single tap”

Slides

Create images based on prompts. Learn more.
New Feature: Create an entire presentation based on your content in Drive and Gmail.

Sheets

Suggest tables for projects based on prompts. Learn more.

Meet

Create background images using prompts. Learn more. (This is gradually rolling out)
Studio Look improves your video quality due to low light or low quality webcams. Learn more. (This is gradually rolling out)
Duet AI only: Real-time automatically translated captions in 18 languages. Learn more.
New feature: Studio Lighting and Studio Sound
New feature: Dynamic tiles and face detection to give meeting room attendees a separate tile with their name. This is rolling out soon.
New feature: “Take notes for me” will capture notes, action items, and video snippets in real time and then send a summary to participants.
New feature: “Summary so far” gives people who join late a summary of what they missed.
New feature: “Attend for me” lets Duet AI join the meeting for you, deliver your message, and ensures you get the meeting recap.

Chat

New Feature: Chat with Duet AI to “ask questions about your content, get a summary of documents shared in a space, and catch up on missed conversations.”

More information

Duet AI for Google Workspace now generally available
Get started with Duet AI
Get Started with Workspace Labs
Data privacy protections with Duet AI in Google Workspace

The New Google Chat

With the migration from Currents to Chat Spaces completed, a whole “new Google Chat” is launching. Note that some of these features will only be available to Google Workspace accounts. There will be more information when these new features become available.

Updated user interface with Material 3 design.
New unified conversation list showing updates to both direct messages (chat conversations) and spaces together.
New “intelligent home view” with “intelligent prioritization of your messages” coming early in 2024.
New shortcuts to a chronological home view, @mentions and starred conversations.
Smart chips (type @ to see suggested files to insert). This is rolling out now to both Google Workspace and personal accounts.
Improved search with a redesigned results page, with suggestions, auto-complete and “AI-based relevance ranking”.
Chat directly with Duet AI for conversation summaries, document summaries and questions about your content.
Huddles: “audio-first impromptu gatherings powered by Meet”. This will be available in Google Workspace customer preview by the end of the year.
Spaces with up to 500,000 members. This will be available in private preview for Google Workspace by the end of the year.
Message view counts in Spaces. Rolling out now to Workspace and personal accounts.
Google Groups integration with synchronization with Space membership. (Google Workspace only.)
Improvements to Apps in Chat.
A section for Apps in the conversation list.
An updated Google Drive app that responds to comments and requests.
More third party apps including Workday, Loom, Zoho and LumApps
Create no-code custom apps using Duet AI in AppSheet (Learn more)
Use Mio for messaging interoperability with Slack, Teams and other messaging platforms. This is in beta for Google Workspace.
Data loss prevention warnings and soon Google Workspace administrator customizable messages. (Google Workspace only)
Content moderation tools in the Google Workspace admin console.

More information: Announcing the launch of an enhanced Google Chat

YouTube Community Guidelines Warnings

YouTube has updated their Community Guidelines enforcement to allow creators who get a policy violation warning to go through a policy training. That will allow the warning to expire after 90 days.

Previously warnings were permanent, and a subsequent violation of the Community Guidelines would result in a strike.

YouTube has found that more than 80% of creators that received a warning never violated the Community Guidelines policies again. This new process will let that warning be removed from their channel.

Warnings are also now focused on specific policies, with the training to match.

I’ve written up an overview of how the new process works here:
YouTube Update: Remove Community Guidelines Warnings with Policy Training

Photos on the Web

If you have a locked folder in Google Photos for your private images, you can now back those up to the cloud and view them on iOS, Android and the web.

Social Media

A recently released study from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Tech Transparency Project (TTP) found that Facebook, Instagram, and X (Twitter) are pushing hateful and anti-semitic content. Some of the worst Nazi and white-supremicist content was pushed to teen accounts. YouTube was the only tested platform that didn’t recommend such content, presumably because they have specifically prevented their algorithm from doing that. USA Today has an overview of the studies.

With upcoming elections in the US and elsewhere, X announced they will be adding labels to posts that violate their “Civic Integrity Policy”. That policy prohibits manipulating or interfering in elections or civic processes.

Patreon has made improvements that let creators organize and showcase their content in Collections. The content is also more discoverable for Members.

More AI Updates

The Meta Privacy Center has a new section on generative AI and a Facebook form you can submit requesting information or deletion of your personal information from third parties used to train generative AI.

X (Twitter) has an updated privacy policy that will go into effect on September 29. The changes include adding information about data collected through biometrics and job applications (a new feature in the pipeline). Also, notably, it has this to say about using your data for AI training: “We may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy.” Those “purposes” seem pretty broad, and it isn’t clear to me what exactly they entail.

Snapchat’s new Dreams lets you use generative AI to create fantasy selfies based on your own photo.

Microsoft shared information on privacy and the Enterprise version of Bing Chat in Windows Copilot. Prompts and responses are not saved and chat data is not used to train the underlying Large Language Model.

Bing Chat has improved responses for maps and directions.

Microsoft Teams is working on intelligent cameras for meeting rooms. The devices can identify individual meeting room participants using face and voice recognition, determine who is speaking and create separate video tiles for individuals.

Bletchley v.3, Microsoft’s vision-language model, is being used to automatically identify “inappropriate” user-uploaded images on the Xbox platform.

At WordPress’s WordCamp, science fiction writer (and lawyer and software engineer) Ken Liu spoke about “Telling the story you want to tell”. It’s thought provoking. You can also read the award-winning short story he talks about “50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know.”

If you have a Chromebook, you can get three months free of NVIDIA’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service. Check your Chromebook’s Perks Page (google.com/intl/en_us/chromebook/perks/) to see if your device is eligible.

Ryan Broderick @ The Verge if we are At the End of the Googleverse. It takes a look back at how Google Search shaped the web. His argument: “Thousands of food bloggers are searching for advice on how to optimize their blogs for Google. The advice that sits at the top of Google is bad, but they’re using it anyway, and now, their blogs all look the same. Isn’t that, in a sense, Google shaping how content is made?”
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That’s all the updates for this week. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader every week. Miss last week’s update? Get the August 26 edition here.

Header image: Clouds Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grey-white-clouds-158163/ (free for commercial use)

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