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
    23•1 year ago

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

      • Chozo
        -11•1 year 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
          19•1 year 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
            6•1 year 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
            1•1 year 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.

        • @RenardDesMers@lemmy.ml
          16•1 year ago

          According to EU law, PII should be accessible, modifiable and deletable by the targeted persons. I don’t think ChatGPT would allow me to delete information about me found in their training data.

          • @Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
            -6•1 year ago

            ban all European IPS from using these applications

            But again, is this your information as in its random individuals or is this really some company roster listing CEOs it grabbed off some third party website that none of us are actually on and its being passed off as if its regular folks information

    • @Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
      2•1 year 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