THE NEWS
Chat Wars
Big tech is betting big on chatbots, but cracks and concerns are starting to appear
CHATBOTS seemed to go from amusing experiment to Next Big Thing in a matter of weeks. The big boys piled in, and a race began. Nobody wanted to be left out. The major players are now all in place, as Apple has decided to join in. It’s to develop its own system called, unimaginatively, AppleGPT. According to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, the company will use AI in a “thoughtful” way.
Building these large language models requires oodles of data, and the obvious source for that is the internet. Swiping data from the internet without asking is an annoyance for Apple, a company that takes privacy a little more seriously than the rest. Google has just quietly updated its terms and conditions to make it clear that all publicly available data will be used to train its AI systems. This includes social media, blogs, news, comments, reviews, website profiles, cookies, and other web activity. Basically, everything.
Worried? Well, the internet has been scraped many times before, and unless there’s a radical shift, it will continue to be a source of data. There are issues about ownership and copyright that occasionally question the process, and OpenAI is getting repeatedly sued. A lawsuit was launched in California claiming that the company had scraped vast amounts of personal data, including social media pages, private conversations, financial, and even medical data. The lawyers claimed OpenAI had decided to “pursue profit at the expense of privacy, security, and ethics”.
One source of data was the use of ChatGPT by medical practices who failed to realize that anything typed into ChatGPT is fed into the data machine, including the list of your symptoms. Another source was photographs of children, used to train DALL-E. Other plaintiffs include authors who discovered that their copyrighted material can be accurately summarized by ChatGPT. There will be a lot more of this as people begin to truly appreciate that if you put something online, you no longer control or own it.