this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Privacy

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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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[–] [email protected] 71 points 11 months ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 60 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Publicly available does not mean free to use.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

large amounts of privately identifiable information (PII)

Yea the wording is kind of ambiguous. Are they saying it's a private phone number or the number of a ted and sons plumbing and heating

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Accountability? For tech giants? AHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAA

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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