Samsung this week became the latest big name to ban its employees from using generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard, warning employees they could be fired if caught using them.
In an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg, Samsung said the ban was due to the discovery that sensitive internal source code was leaked by an engineer who uploaded it to ChatGPT last month. According to earlier reports, a Samsung employee was said to have asked a chatbot to check sensitive database source code for errors, while another fed a ChatGPT-recorded meeting and asked it to generate minutes.
The Korean tech giant is the latest company to crack down on ChatGPT use. US banking giant JPMorgan recently restricted its use among employees due to compliance concerns, and Amazon reportedly urged employees not to share code with an AI chatbot. Verizon and Accenture have also taken similar steps, and Italy briefly banned ChatGPT last month, saying it was concerned the services breached EU data protection laws.
Even Microsoft, which has a multi-billion dollar stake in ChatGPT owner OpenAI, has doubts. According to a new report, Microsoft’s Azure cloud server unit plans to sell an alternative version of ChatGPT that will run on dedicated cloud servers, where data will be kept separate from that of other customers.
These concerns are by no means unfounded. Not only can tools like ChatGPT help attackers write legitimate phishing emails and malicious code, they also carry data breach risks. Those risks have already made themselves felt: OpenAI acknowledged in March that ChatGPT had indeed suffered its first major data breach, exposing personal and partial payment data of ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
Sophisticated AI, ancient technology
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT provide powerful capabilities for non-technical users and represent a huge leap forward in both what AI can do and its potential to revolutionize everything from the way we work to the way we make decisions. For non-technical users who are now using technology to create human-like scripts for articles and social media copy, it may seem like the future has arrived. In fact, some have called it a new industrial revolution.
While it may sound like a kind of magic eight ball, the infrastructure behind generative AI is nothing new. Just like a cloud storage service, all the data you share with ChatGPT is stored on OpenAI’s servers. Besides prompts and chat conversations, OpenAI saves other data as well, such as your account details, approximate location, IP address, payment details, and device information. This data is used to train and improve the model, according to OpenAI, so it can better understand and respond to natural language queries.
Artificial Intelligence is Just Someone Else’s Computer by Carly Page originally posted on TechCrunch