I had a strange and similar interaction with Google recently. I was asked to do the Android developer verification, but then I missed a deadline at some point. Support said that I would need to create a new Google account for all of this. I said this was unacceptable as this was a Google account I had for nearly 25 years and I didn't want to create another. They said tough luck, go make the new account. Luckily, I had recently married and was making a new account for the name change. I tried to use that account, but it wanted a different phone number to use for verification, but I only have one number and you can't use Google voice numbers. I went back and told Google I cannot use the same phone number to verify and I'm not buying a burner phone to do this with. Then they just said "Ah, ok, we'll fix your original account then" and fixed the original account. This was literally a week of back and forth. Pointless waste of time.
Last year our bakery business got blocked from Google Maps. Reason: Your business is not eligible...
Yep, apparently a brick and mortar bakery isn't eligible for Google Maps. Obviously bogus. I appealed over and over again, rereading the rules, watching every dumb YouTube video, fixing every minor imagined transgression I could think of and each time just got another BS automated "your business is not eligible...".
Pretty much gave up them my partner decided to try one more time. In Vietnamese.
We had both been trying, she in Vietnamese, me in English, but this time she tried it at about 10:30pm local time and apparently it got routed to a bored Vietnamese speaker in the California help center, who fixed it immediately.
So it is possible but it'll take some weird combination of luck and timing.
Had similar experience. My best guess is that the account never went through the various age verification flows (since it was that old, it predated all that) and ended up being marked for deletion- I suspect that they had a bug (legal or in code) that prevented warning emails to get out. I got lucky to detect it early, since they disabled AI a few weeks before account deletion.
My gmail account still has the "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail." mail in it from June 2004. The account itself is over 21 years old. I wonder if I'll get forced to age verify myself any time?
500000000th person discovers google is not creating youtube for you, but for them to make cash. Crazy story. Really shocking and definitely not one of the most standard complaints in existence.
Anyways, there's absolutely no such thing as "I can't stop paying for this". Just do a chargeback on your card. It's not a real problem.
I agree. The answer is regulation that outlines rules of engagement for "free" (you are the product) online services.
Australia is famous for having very strong consumer protection laws for purchased products (physical goods). It has been discussed many times here. How does this work in the digital universe?
Was browsing when all of a sudden my account got suspended for no apparent reason.
This was a premium account too, and I had last posted a tweet last year. I would maybe comment here and there once a week.
Ok cool you suspended my account. But when I tried to access my billing details to cancel the premuim sub, I got a "Something went wrong" error.
All these big tech companies have the same billing issues after bans/suspensions. Once they decide you're persona non grata, they don't give a f about cancelling your billing.
I'd imagine if you have a card payment reverted to Google and they ban you in return, you're in a world of pain (that you are in the right probably doesn't matter).
Google has a degree of seperation value stored on every account. Once the algorithm determines its been wronged it increases the radius so expect your household members and work colleagues accounts to be at risk when you try this.
By comparison, Goldman, the bank operating Apple Card in the U.S., has previously refused to perform that block future debits process for me; they simply didn’t have the capability. I ended up closing my account with them to stop the charges, which worked perfectly. I envy Australia’s apparent regulation to compel merchants to do so.
I some countries, however, this may penalize you, credit score wise or whatever.
This option, in my opinion, should truly be the last resource, after exhausting (and documenting) every other route.
Very important: public routes, like Twitter Support, even better (make sure every step is traceable if the only option left is, indeed, blocking debts on your credit card).
You haven't signed any agreement or opened any lines of credit - I would be amazed if there was any jurisdiction in the entire world where this would affect your credit.
Subscriptions are not a contract of payment. Your bank pre-authorizes these payments, simply ask them to remove pre-authorization. If they can't do that, then the bank is spending your money without your consent.
> That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it.
I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. While I disagree with a lot of what they do, I do assume that they have an interest in protecting music made by artists, not music generated as a product (though of course they also produce music like products with a lot of their human "artists").
> flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business.
This is questionable. Did generated code decrease the price of software products?
I get what you mean but I don't really think they are comparable, since one of them is art and the other is typically product development. Art factors in the person behind the art piece, software (or other products) does not. The value of art is tied to the skill, creativity and experience required to make it as good as it is (at least in most people's mind).
But also, the main claim of the advantages of code generation is that it will make software development cheaper, and will end up making software cheaper. This is currently not necessarily the case because the quality of the code generation is not really there to make actual (reliable) product development cheaper, but it helps a lot with rapid prototyping. Or as I see it, more things are being prototyped and never finished. What also factors into this is that there are not many incentives for big tech companies to lower their prices, because a lot of what they're offering are tools that we need. This is also not the case with generated music.
There are multiple topics mentioned in this article. One is quite curious, which I had missed before, I must admit:
Universal Music Group is currently at the center of a growing legal fight against AI music platforms like Suno and Udio, accusing them of training on copyrighted music without permission. [...] The claim is straightforward. These systems learned from real artists without paying for it, and now they can generate songs that compete with the originals
To be honest - I really doubt that Suno-like company created music they taught their systems on. The AI companies are usually using our property (text, music, code) to teach their models and then sell them to us. Quite different view than a constant admiration on how the AI helps us coding...
Sad story but this has been written by an LLM (to original short story has been inflated by and LLM to turn into an "article").
Speak w/ your bank and ask them to block future charges - easy.
Could not get through the article because it looks like LLM generated text squared.
But I assume people will have protections against this? One can just let their credit card company know to block out the next payment, or dispute the charges; I am assuming the user will have adequate proof that they aren't able to get to their subscription account.
While what Google is doing here is scummy, I'm assuming that multiple consumer reversals will make at least a minor dent to their financial reputation with the banks? Did this even need so much AI text?
I had a strange and similar interaction with Google recently. I was asked to do the Android developer verification, but then I missed a deadline at some point. Support said that I would need to create a new Google account for all of this. I said this was unacceptable as this was a Google account I had for nearly 25 years and I didn't want to create another. They said tough luck, go make the new account. Luckily, I had recently married and was making a new account for the name change. I tried to use that account, but it wanted a different phone number to use for verification, but I only have one number and you can't use Google voice numbers. I went back and told Google I cannot use the same phone number to verify and I'm not buying a burner phone to do this with. Then they just said "Ah, ok, we'll fix your original account then" and fixed the original account. This was literally a week of back and forth. Pointless waste of time.
I'm surprised you were able to get a person to address your issue.
I thought exactly the same! My question: How/Why were they able to speak to a human (or maybe chat/email)?
Last year our bakery business got blocked from Google Maps. Reason: Your business is not eligible...
Yep, apparently a brick and mortar bakery isn't eligible for Google Maps. Obviously bogus. I appealed over and over again, rereading the rules, watching every dumb YouTube video, fixing every minor imagined transgression I could think of and each time just got another BS automated "your business is not eligible...".
Pretty much gave up them my partner decided to try one more time. In Vietnamese.
We had both been trying, she in Vietnamese, me in English, but this time she tried it at about 10:30pm local time and apparently it got routed to a bored Vietnamese speaker in the California help center, who fixed it immediately.
So it is possible but it'll take some weird combination of luck and timing.
Had similar experience. My best guess is that the account never went through the various age verification flows (since it was that old, it predated all that) and ended up being marked for deletion- I suspect that they had a bug (legal or in code) that prevented warning emails to get out. I got lucky to detect it early, since they disabled AI a few weeks before account deletion.
My gmail account still has the "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail." mail in it from June 2004. The account itself is over 21 years old. I wonder if I'll get forced to age verify myself any time?
You are just a row in a database. Column can’t have nulls.
500000000th person discovers google is not creating youtube for you, but for them to make cash. Crazy story. Really shocking and definitely not one of the most standard complaints in existence.
Anyways, there's absolutely no such thing as "I can't stop paying for this". Just do a chargeback on your card. It's not a real problem.
I'm getting a 403 forbidden on this page.
I assume you have a consumer protection agency. Ping them.
Put it in plain words. "I have been paying... they made it impossible to access stuff I paid for and made it impossible to unsubscribe."
That's textbook fraud. They'll be fined and give you your money back.
I agree. The answer is regulation that outlines rules of engagement for "free" (you are the product) online services.
Australia is famous for having very strong consumer protection laws for purchased products (physical goods). It has been discussed many times here. How does this work in the digital universe?
Literally had a similar experience with X today.
Was browsing when all of a sudden my account got suspended for no apparent reason. This was a premium account too, and I had last posted a tweet last year. I would maybe comment here and there once a week.
Ok cool you suspended my account. But when I tried to access my billing details to cancel the premuim sub, I got a "Something went wrong" error.
All these big tech companies have the same billing issues after bans/suspensions. Once they decide you're persona non grata, they don't give a f about cancelling your billing.
Easy fix, wait for the next billing, contact the bank explaining what happened, and block that and future debits.
At least in Australia, this shouldn't be a problem.
I'd imagine if you have a card payment reverted to Google and they ban you in return, you're in a world of pain (that you are in the right probably doesn't matter).
The OP is already banned? Whats the issue in cancelling a charge you cannot use?
Google has a degree of seperation value stored on every account. Once the algorithm determines its been wronged it increases the radius so expect your household members and work colleagues accounts to be at risk when you try this.
For three generations, unless you watch re-education videos.
bullshit - canceling the authorization will have no affect on your account at all, the subscription will just end.
In Google's eyes cancelling the authorisation is robbing them because they charge in advance and they might even cop a rejected payment fee.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45157001
By comparison, Goldman, the bank operating Apple Card in the U.S., has previously refused to perform that block future debits process for me; they simply didn’t have the capability. I ended up closing my account with them to stop the charges, which worked perfectly. I envy Australia’s apparent regulation to compel merchants to do so.
I think it’s the bank that blocks the merchant here in Aus.
Same for uk. Can cancel direct debits from the bank website.
Things like this would probably not be via direct debit though
I some countries, however, this may penalize you, credit score wise or whatever.
This option, in my opinion, should truly be the last resource, after exhausting (and documenting) every other route.
Very important: public routes, like Twitter Support, even better (make sure every step is traceable if the only option left is, indeed, blocking debts on your credit card).
You haven't signed any agreement or opened any lines of credit - I would be amazed if there was any jurisdiction in the entire world where this would affect your credit.
I contacted TM Bank and they would't let me do this.
Subscriptions are not a contract of payment. Your bank pre-authorizes these payments, simply ask them to remove pre-authorization. If they can't do that, then the bank is spending your money without your consent.
Might be an idea to switch to a bank or credit union that have better customer service?
it's besides the point of the post but
> That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it.
I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. While I disagree with a lot of what they do, I do assume that they have an interest in protecting music made by artists, not music generated as a product (though of course they also produce music like products with a lot of their human "artists").
> flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business.
This is questionable. Did generated code decrease the price of software products?
I get what you mean but I don't really think they are comparable, since one of them is art and the other is typically product development. Art factors in the person behind the art piece, software (or other products) does not. The value of art is tied to the skill, creativity and experience required to make it as good as it is (at least in most people's mind).
But also, the main claim of the advantages of code generation is that it will make software development cheaper, and will end up making software cheaper. This is currently not necessarily the case because the quality of the code generation is not really there to make actual (reliable) product development cheaper, but it helps a lot with rapid prototyping. Or as I see it, more things are being prototyped and never finished. What also factors into this is that there are not many incentives for big tech companies to lower their prices, because a lot of what they're offering are tools that we need. This is also not the case with generated music.
There are a lot of executives acting in a way that makes me believe they're less interested in viability than causing a stockmarket supernova.
There are multiple topics mentioned in this article. One is quite curious, which I had missed before, I must admit:
To be honest - I really doubt that Suno-like company created music they taught their systems on. The AI companies are usually using our property (text, music, code) to teach their models and then sell them to us. Quite different view than a constant admiration on how the AI helps us coding...Sad story but this has been written by an LLM (to original short story has been inflated by and LLM to turn into an "article"). Speak w/ your bank and ask them to block future charges - easy.
The thing is so unreadable one would think that it's a parody of an LLM article.
Could not get through the article because it looks like LLM generated text squared.
But I assume people will have protections against this? One can just let their credit card company know to block out the next payment, or dispute the charges; I am assuming the user will have adequate proof that they aren't able to get to their subscription account.
While what Google is doing here is scummy, I'm assuming that multiple consumer reversals will make at least a minor dent to their financial reputation with the banks? Did this even need so much AI text?
the llm writing is so annoying
I bet Google is training their models on videos uploaded on YouTube.
What a joke. People, start putting a license fee on your YouTube videos for AI training. Play their game.