In a latest development, the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI, is facing a class action lawsuit alleging that the company’s AI training procedures infringed the privacy and copyright of virtually everyone who has ever uploaded information online.
How Did This Happen?
It appears that OpenAI gathered a sizable amount of data from diverse online sources in order to train its cutting-edge AI language models.
The data consists of a variety of contents including explicit content from specialized genres as well as Wikipedia articles, best-selling books, social media posts, and popular publications.
Notably, OpenAI collected all of this data without first getting consent from the content producers.
It is claimed in the class action case, which has been filed in California, OpenAI’s disregard for legal protocol, including requesting permission from content providers, amounts to flagrant data theft.
Further, the statement in lawsuits says, “Instead of following established procedures for the acquisition and usage of personal information, the Defendants resorted to theft. They systematically scraped 300 billion words from the internet, including ‘books, articles, websites, and posts,’ which also included personal information obtained without consent.”
Questions About Ethicality Of Artificial Intelligence
There is a possibility that if you have been an active online user and have produced any content online then the chatbot may have been trained on that content.
In other words, the output that OpenAI’s ChatGPT gives, which is being utilized for commercial purposes, may have bits of the data you provided that were gathered through silent scraping.
The managing partner at the legal firm that is suing OpenAI, Ryan Clarkson said,“all of that information is being taken at scale” without being initially intended for use by a substantial language model.
This revelation has raised questions about the ethicality of artificial intelligence.
Perhaps it was the first notion that popped up when all these AI tools saw an expansion and continue to do so.
Although the use of AI tools help the world of humans, one cannot turn a blind eye to their misuse.
The bias in training data is one of the main ethical criticisms leveled against ChatGPT by academics and online activists, according to research and reports.
ChatGPT is prone to biases in the training data sets, which would subsequently show up in the model’s output or answers being a language model trained on particular data sets.
Besides this, it may be utilized to generate responses for any test or may facilitate impersonation, which might lead to the spreading of false information.
It has the ability to sound like human speech so it may be utilized maliciously.
Other than this, there are concerns about privacy and how a language-model chatbot might be employed to obtain data from users who have not explicitly given their consent to do so.
In today’s world, data is everything, and every other day we receive news of a potential data breach from some part of the world, leaving the personal information of thousands of people exposed to abuse by for-profit businesses that sell goods and services.
Anytime, users can reveal personal information, behavioral tendencies, or biases when interacting using ChatGPT.
This information might fetch top cash in the current global data mining industry.
