That was more an example, rather than something they would actually do. Of course there is a million other ways of doing it, but the more control you have over the data, the better you can develop an AI.

I mean, Google’s already mastered AI. People tend to think of natural intelligence (like humans) when they think about the development of AI.

AI is just a learning system. Google recommendations are a complex calculation on everything that you’ve recently interacted with to figure out the thing most likely you’ll want next.

Unless the function is completely static, which I doubt, it would be considered AI, even if it doesn’t attempt to imitate real intelligence. The function is probably given some weights from Google engineers (basically, what results are valuable), and through trial and error, the program is likely learning how to get more clicks. The more data it can process, the more users it has to try with, the faster it can advance.

This is of course pretty simplistic compered to the math behind how this works, but it gets the point across

There is some potential legal issues if you scrape someone else’s data to train your AI. If your users signed the ToS there is no legal recourse so they can use anything.