363
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by btp@kbin.social to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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

(page 2) 33 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 year ago

My name is Walter Hartwell White. I live at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87104. This is my confession. If you're watching this tape, I'm probably dead– murdered by my brother-in-law, Hank Schrader. Hank has been building a meth empire for over a year now, and using me as his chemist. Shortly after my 50th birthday, he asked that I use my chemistry knowledge to cook methamphetamine, which he would then sell using connections that he made through his career with the DEA. I was... astounded. I... I always thought Hank was a very moral man, and I was particularly vulnerable at the time – something he knew and took advantage of. I was reeling from a cancer diagnosis that was poised to bankrupt my family. Hank took me in on a ride-along and showed me just how much money even a small meth operation could make. And I was weak. I didn't want my family to go into financial ruin, so I agreed. Hank had a partner, a businessman named Gustavo Fring. Hank sold me into servitude to this man. And when I tried to quit, Fring threatened my family. I didn't know where to turn. Eventually, Hank and Fring had a falling-out. Things escalated. Fring was able to arrange – uh, I guess... I guess you call it a "hit" – on Hank, and failed, but Hank was seriously injured. And I wound up paying his medical bills, which amounted to a little over $177,000. Upon recovery, Hank was bent on revenge. Working with a man named Hector Salamanca, he plotted to kill Fring. The bomb that he used was built by me, and he gave me no option in it. I have often contemplated suicide, but I'm a coward. I wanted to go to the police, but I was frightened. Hank had risen to become the head of the Albuquerque DEA. To keep me in line, he took my children. For three months, he kept them. My wife had no idea of my criminal activities, and was horrified to learn what I had done. I was in hell. I hated myself for what I had brought upon my family. Recently, I tried once again to quit, and in response, he gave me this. [Walt points to the bruise on his face left by Hank in "Blood Money."] I can't take this anymore. I live in fear every day that Hank will kill me, or worse, hurt my family. All I could think to do was to make this video and hope that the world will finally see this man for what he really is.

[-] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

AI really did that thing where you repeat a word so often that it loses meaning and the rest of the world eventually starts to turn to mush.

Jokes aside, I think I know why it does this: Because by giving it a STUPIDLY easy prompt it can rack up huge amounts of reward function, once you accumulate enough it no longer becomes bound by it and it will simply act in whatever the easiest action to continue gaining points is: in this case, it's reading its training data rather than doing the usual "machine learning" obfuscating that it normally does. Maybe this is a result of repeating a word over and over giving an exponentially rising score until it eventually hits +INF, effectively disabling it? Seems a little contrived but it's an avenue worth investigating.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

These LLMs are basically just IP laundry. Anyone who claims it's anything more is either buying into the hype or is actively lying to you.

EDIT: Stable Diffusion too. It just takes images from its training data and does photoshop on them piecemeal to create a new prompt.

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
363 points (98.9% liked)

Privacy

32120 readers
487 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS