Alphabet Inc. (Google), one of AI’s biggest backers, warns own employees about how they use chatbots, including its own Bard.
Reuters reported that 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 warned 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.
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.”
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.
Thanks to Geri Mendelsohn for this item.
