Google, one of AI’s biggest backers, warns own staff about chatbots
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[June 15, 2023]
By Jeffrey Dastin and Anna Tong
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc is cautioning employees about how
they use chatbots, including its own Bard, at the same time as it
markets the program around the world, four people familiar with the
matter told Reuters.
The Google parent has advised employees not to enter its confidential
materials into AI chatbots, the people said and the company confirmed,
citing long-standing policy on safeguarding information.
The chatbots, among them Bard and ChatGPT, are human-sounding programs
that use so-called generative artificial intelligence to hold
conversations with users and answer myriad prompts. Human reviewers may
read the chats, and researchers found that similar AI could reproduce
the data it absorbed during training, creating a leak risk.
Alphabet also alerted its engineers to avoid direct use of computer code
that chatbots can generate, some of the people said.
Asked for comment, the company said Bard can make undesired code
suggestions, but it helps programmers nonetheless. Google also said it
aimed to be transparent about the limitations of its technology.
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The concerns show how Google wishes to avoid business harm from software
it launched in competition with ChatGPT. At stake in Google’s race
against ChatGPT’s backers OpenAI and Microsoft Corp are billions of
dollars of investment and still untold advertising and cloud revenue
from new AI programs.
Google’s caution also reflects what’s becoming a security standard for
corporations, namely to warn personnel about using publicly-available
chat programs.
A growing number of businesses around the world have set up guardrails
on AI chatbots, among them Samsung, Amazon.com and Deutsche Bank, the
companies told Reuters. Apple, which did not return requests for
comment, reportedly has as well.
Some 43% of professionals were using ChatGPT or other AI tools as of
January, often without telling their bosses, according to a survey of
nearly 12,000 respondents including from top U.S.-based companies, done
by the networking site Fishbowl.
By February, Google told staff testing Bard before its launch not to
give it internal information, Insider reported. Now Google is rolling
out Bard to more than 180 countries and in 40 languages as a springboard
for creativity, and its warnings extend to its code suggestions.
Google told Reuters it has had detailed conversations with Ireland's
Data Protection Commission and is addressing regulators' questions,
after a Politico report Tuesday that the company was postponing Bard's
EU launch this week pending more information about the chatbot's impact
on privacy.
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Google logo and AI Artificial
Intelligence words are seen in this illustration taken, May 4, 2023.
REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
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WORRIES ABOUT SENSITIVE INFORMATION
Such technology can draft emails, documents, even software itself,
promising to vastly speed up tasks. Included in this content,
however, can be misinformation, sensitive data or even copyrighted
passages from a “Harry Potter” novel.
A Google privacy notice updated on June 1 also states: "Don’t
include confidential or sensitive information in your Bard
conversations."
Some companies have developed software to address such concerns. For
instance, Cloudflare, which defends websites against cyberattacks
and offers other cloud services, is marketing a capability for
businesses to tag and restrict some data from flowing externally.
Google and Microsoft also are offering conversational tools to
business customers that will come with a higher price tag but
refrain from absorbing data into public AI models. The default
setting in Bard and ChatGPT is to save users' conversation history,
which users can opt to delete.
It "makes sense" that companies would not want their staff to use
public chatbots for work, said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's consumer
chief marketing officer.
"Companies are taking a duly conservative standpoint," said Mehdi,
explaining how Microsoft's free Bing chatbot compares with its
enterprise software. "There, our policies are much more strict."
Microsoft declined to comment on whether it has a blanket ban on
staff entering confidential information into public AI programs,
including its own, though a different executive there told Reuters
he personally restricted his use.
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Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said that typing confidential
matters into chatbots was like "turning a bunch of PhD students
loose in all of your private records."
(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin and Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing
by Kenneth Li and Nick Zieminski)
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