A few weeks ago, I told you a bit about the new artificial intelligence “chat bot”, ChatGPT. It’s been in the news ever since for all sorts of reasons – with technical issues, worries about it putting people out of a job and giving people risky advice.
Well, these “large language models” as they’re called have just hit another snag, starting with the Italian government – but other governments probably aren’t far behind. And the issue is with privacy.
The way these computer programs work is that they’re “trained” by getting them to read everything they can get their metaphorical hands on. That means scraping every bit of information they can reach off the internet.
Now that’s already caused arguments with writers and artists over copyright, but it’s also an issue for people who might have personal information listed online – because these computer programs are very, very good at finding information. It can be very well hidden, to the point where an individual might not even know it’s there, and wouldn’t think of it as public.
The Italian regulators have demanded that ChatGPT stops using the data of Italian citizens – but of course, that’s no simple task. As a temporary measure, the programmers have just stopped people in Italy from accessing ChatGPT, but that doesn’t really solve the problem. The data has already been used to train the program.
It could all get very messy for these large language models (Chat GPT isn’t the only one). We might find they spend the next few years bogged down in the courts – and I think I’m okay with that, to be honest. It might just put the brakes on this rush for ever-cleverer AI, which sounds like a very sensible move to me.
Who knows what I did on holiday last year?
Just a quick reminder that the newly-updated Privacy book I’ve been talking about will be available to order at 11am tomorrow. Full information about what’s covered then.
You’ll also find out a bit more about what I actually mean by privacy – what kind of thing they actually know (and who they are) and what they use it for.
For example, I was staggered the other day when I discovered that one organisation that you’ll have heard of knew I’d been on holiday last year. (And they were nothing to do with the holiday – not the travel agent or train company or anything.) They not only knew that, they knew where I stayed and what places I visited while I was there – on what days, and what time of day – and even what route I drove back to the cottage we were staying at.
Curious who knew all that? Well, watch out for my email at 11am tomorrow and read the full information.
Hi you are wonderful and a tremendous help, thank you so much 💓 😊 ☺️