op turned off reblogs so the correction i made cant be reblogged, so im making a new post, mostly just repeating what i said. tl;dr:
google docs is not randomly deleting peoples work for being nsfw. there is no evidence at all that you are at risk of having google delete your fics for having "inappropriate" content.
this article by the wired is the only "source" op has ever provided. i would very very much recommend both reading the entire article and looking at the linked posts in it for yourself. it is also self-admittedly the only source they've ever found - so keep that in mind. it's about k. renee, an open door romance novelist who had her work restricted by google. "open door romance" refers to works where sex scenes happen on screens and are described in detail. they are explicit works. the article talks about similar things happening to a few different authors who write in the same genre.
the incidents described in this article happened in march 2024, which is over a year ago.
those affected had their works restricted, with a warning message. they were not abruptly deleted out of no where. authors were able to file appeals with google to recover their docs, though i havent found any updates on if they were successful in doing so.
the reason this happened is because google docs incorrectly flagged the shared documents as spam.
That author later posted a video to Instagram explaining that it wasnât the adult content in the files but rather âGoogle thought I was spamming people.â Apparently, sending the same doc to scores of peopleâfor example, alpha and beta readersâcan make it appear as though the doc was unsolicited.
sharing a document that contains "adult content" with a lot of people will trigger google's automod, but the adult content itself is not the problem. if you are sharing a doc with a handful of people, or arent sharing it at all, this is not going to happen. from my own personal testimony, i have dozens and dozens of explicit, nsfw work in my google docs that ive shared with people, and none of them have been touched. i have not seen a single claim with proof that anyone's work has been deleted in the manner the original op describes.
there is no source at all for original op's claim that google is "using AI to find inappropriate and problematic content". in the above article (again, the only source), ai is mentioned once, to say that k. renee had ai functions turned off and did not think that was the problem.
Renee hadnât turned on any of the AI functions in Google Workspace, so she doubted it could be chalked up to a bot banning her books. After all, a 2016 paper coauthored by Google researchers revealed that its recurrent neural network language models had been fed thousands of romances. If for some reason a bot was crawling her work, wouldnât it recognize what it was looking at?
and, lets just think logically for a moment. if google docs was doing some sort of mass cleans of nsfw content using ai, dont you think it would be a more widespread story? would it be this hard to find sources and testimony about it? google docs has literally millions of users, including published authors and scientists and academics. if an ai bot was crawling works and deleting any it deemed nsfw, it would be mainstream news because it would be affecting countless people. and especially without disclosing a change in policy beforehand? they would probably get sued for it!
i am not making this post in defense of google, god forbid. google is open about the fact that they use any "publicly available" information to train their ai models (and did get sued for it), though they claim that they dont take from docs that they dont have permission to. i honestly, genuinely, cannot tell you the veracity of these claims or how serious the scraping is. like, i just do not know if google scrapes from private gdocs. if someone knows more and has better sources they are free to add on to the post.
but i want it to be clear that google docs is not going to randomly delete your works for having nsfw content. docs and pages disappear sometimes because google docs is a mess. you should always back up your files locally (switching to programs like ellipsus doesnt make your work safer, per se, as ellipsus is still cloud-based), and you should consider switching away from google docs if youre staunchly anti-ai, but they are not going to abruptly explode all your fics. that is simply not happening. you do not have to panic.
