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
How is this different than just googling for someone’s email or Twitter handle and Google showing you that info? PII that is public is going to show up in places where you can ask or search for it, no?
It isn’t, but the GDPR requires companies to scrub PII when requested by the individual. OpenAI obviously can’t do that so in theory they would be liable for essentially unlimited fines unless they deleted the offending models.
In practice it remains to be seen how courts would interpret this though, and I expect unless the problem is really egregious there will be some kind of exception. Nobody wants to be the one to say these models are illegal.
But they obviously are. Quick money by fining the crap out of them. Everyone is about short term gains these days, no?
Are they illegal if they were entirely free tho?
It isn’t. If someone is upset about this wait until they find out google’s web cache or the wayback machine exists.