This troubling ability could be used by scammers or to target ads.

Vechev and his team found that the large language models that power advanced chatbots can accurately infer an alarming amount of personal information about users—including their race, location, occupation, and more—from conversations that appear innocuous.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    New research reveals that chatbots like ChatGPT can infer a lot of sensitive information about the people they chat with, even if the conversation is utterly mundane.

    “It’s not even clear how you fix this problem,” says Martin Vechev, a computer science professor at ETH Zürich in Switzerland who led the research.

    He adds that the same underlying capability could portend a new era of advertising, in which companies use information gathered from chatbots to build detailed profiles of users.

    The Zürich researchers tested language models developed by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic.

    Anthropic referred to its privacy policy, which states that it does not harvest or “sell” personal information.

    “This certainly raises questions about how much information about ourselves we’re inadvertently leaking in situations where we might expect anonymity,” says Florian Tramèr, an assistant professor also at ETH Zürich who was not involved with the work but saw details presented at a conference last week.

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