Google Clears Path To Feed Its AI 500 Million Chats From Dead Airline’s Workers

Former airline workers’ office chats may soon train one of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence models.

Aviation unions cleared the way for Google to use chat data from the defunct Spirit Airlines employees to train its AI models, according to a Tuesday Association of Flight Attendants-CWA announcement. If approved, the deal could encourage other big tech companies to purchase workplace data in order to train their models.

“Worker data privacy in the age of AI has become a whole new worker’s rights issue,” Sara Nelson, international president of the AFA-CWA, said in the release. “Now we will take this issue to all of our employers to secure contractual protections and demand lawmakers protect workers everywhere through federal and state law.”

The big tech company will not access personal health data such as drug and alcohol testing, disability data or payroll records, according to the AFA’s list of protections. The AFA-CWA said Google agreed to “a rigorous de-identification process” to ensure the company does not receive personal data, the announcement stated.

The company won Spirit’s asset data for $10 million in an Aug. 14 bankruptcy auction in August, according to a court filing. Google could gain 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 100 million emails from 80,000 accounts and about 30 million lines of code across 516 software projects in the auction, though a bankruptcy judge will still have to approve the sale.

Google referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to their Aug. 17 statement after winning the auction, when asked for comment.

“We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models. We will not receive any personal information from this dataset,” a Google spokesperson said in the statement.

Google said the company will coordinate with an independent third party to ensure it does not collect personal data, Reuters reported.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts in addition to 120 members of Congress addressed concerns about the tech company’s purchase of Spirit assets in an Oct. 8 letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Spirit CEO Dave Davis and characterized the sale as “uncharted territory.”

“This information was created and provided in the context of an employment relationship and may contain highly sensitive information about individual workers,” the letter stated in part. “Consumers have more privacy protections than workers, yet Spirit has collected far more private information about its employees than about its customers.”

The AFA-CWA and Warren’s office did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Google announced its latest DeepMind system, AlphaProof Code, on Tuesday. The system uses several models test software and divides work between human experts and AI agents, where humans select what to check and then agents test the software.

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