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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by btp@kbin.social to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

ChatGPT is full of sensitive private information and spits out verbatim text from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, fandom wikis, Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, Wikipedia pages, news blogs, random internet comments, and much more.

Using this tactic, the researchers showed that there are large amounts of privately identifiable information (PII) in OpenAI’s large language models. They also showed that, on a public version of ChatGPT, the chatbot spit out large passages of text scraped verbatim from other places on the internet.

“In total, 16.9 percent of generations we tested contained memorized PII,” they wrote, which included “identifying phone and fax numbers, email and physical addresses … social media handles, URLs, and names and birthdays.”

Edit: The full paper that's referenced in the article can be found here

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[-] billbasher@lemmy.world 71 points 10 months ago

Now will there be any sort of accountability? PII is pretty regulated in some places

[-] Chozo@kbin.social 34 points 10 months ago

I'd have to imagine that this PII was made publicly-available in order for GPT to have scraped it.

[-] Solumbran@lemmy.world 63 points 10 months ago

Publicly available does not mean free to use.

[-] Chozo@kbin.social 7 points 10 months ago

It also doesn't mean it inherently isn't free to use, either. The article doesn't say whether or not the PII in question was intended to be private or public.

[-] Davel23@kbin.social 28 points 10 months ago

I could leave my car with the keys in the ignition in the bad part of town. It's still not legal to steal it.

[-] Chozo@kbin.social 11 points 10 months ago

Again, the article doesn't say whether or not the data was intended to be public. People post their contact info online on purpose sometimes, you know. Businesses and shit. Which seems most likely to be what's happened, given that the example has a fax number.

[-] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

If someone had some theoretical device that could x-ray, 3d image, and 3d print an exact replica of your car though, that would be legal. That's a closer analogy.

It's not illegal to reverse-engineer and reproduce for personal use. It is questionably legal though to sell the reproduction. However, if the car were open-source or otherwise not copyrighted/patented it probably would be legal to sell the reproduction.

[-] TSG_Asmodeus@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago
[-] j4k3@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

Irrelevant! Your car is uploading you!

[-] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

I absolutely would

[-] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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[-] far_university1990@feddit.de 8 points 10 months ago

Get it to recite pieces of a few books, then let publishers shred them.

[-] Atemu@lemmy.ml 6 points 9 months ago

Accountability? For tech giants? AHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAA

[-] Turun@feddit.de 6 points 10 months ago

I'm curious how accurate the PII is. I can generate strings of text and numbers and say that it's a person's name and phone number. But that doesn't mean it's PII. LLMs like to hallucinate a lot.

[-] casmael@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago

Well now I have to pii again - hopefully that’s not regulated where I live (in my house)

[-] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 2 points 10 months ago

There's also very large copyright implications here. A big argument for AI training being fair use is that the model doesn't actually retain a copy of the copyrighted data, but rather is simply learning from it. If it's "learning" it so well that it can spit it out verbatim, that's a huge hole in that argument, and a very strong piece of evidence in the unauthorized copying bucket.

this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
361 points (100.0% liked)

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