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.

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

  • Chozo@kbin.social
    617·
    11 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
      283·
      11 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
        112·
        11 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@lemmy.world
        57·
        11 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.