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Companies banning the use of ChatGPT level tools going forward will find the rules either flouted, subverted or the employees going elsewhere. Of course there

Companies banning the use of ChatGPT level tools going forward will find the rules either flouted, subverted or the employees going elsewhere. Of course there is a duty on employees to be professional - the latter will be the ones taking up opportunities at non-legacy/dinosaur corporations that think they can command the waves. The answer is to sort your processes, security and training out - new AI is here to stay, and managers cannot stop employees using game-changing tools without looking very foolish and incompetent.

bretticus 4y ago
Why? It’s a valid concern in my opinion. You’re feeding OpenAI your intellectual property and just hoping they don’t do anything with it. I have the same concerns with Microsoft’s TypeScript playground
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago
  It is a valid concern if you send an entire list of confidential data and ask it to transform that list. However if you ask ChatGPT some questions about coding in general it's no different than searching online.
  - DANmode 4y ago
    Unless you feed it your proprietary code — something Samsung chip fabrication employees actually did.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    This comes down to whether you trust your whole organization to act be educated about these issues and be good at judging what's ok. At the size of Samsung that's just an impossible move, and it's easier to blanket ban a problematic service and have employee request exceptions justifying their use case. BTW I've been in companies that blanket ban posting stuff online, and got posts security reviewed when asking help on vendor community forums. That's totally a thing.
- golergka 4y ago
  Yes, 20 lines of transforming jsons from one form to another are exactly what OpenAI employees are looking for in all the data they're gathering. How will my company survive after they get their hands on this?
  - babyshake 4y ago
    Good opsec/appsec requires doing things that seem unnecessary. And it depends on the context. Passing a private key or raw text customer password to any type of online tool is never a good idea.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    You'd be surprised how much load bearing software could be reduced to 20 lines of data transforms, or less.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  It's like WFH/in-office. Some people care and some don't, you're removing the ones who care. Personally I haven't used GPT much so I wouldn't mind, but banning copilot would make me reconsider.
NhanH 4y ago
It’s not clear whether ChatGPT and the likes would increase productivity at the organization level. And I am talking about the current GPT-4, not some hypothetical AGI. From what I have seen, a large swath of usages are basically just people DDOSing their teams with a lot of words. Things like someone in a marketing team prompting for a “detailed 10-week plan with actual numbers” that naturally have no basis on reality, but will take a lot of effort from their team to decipher the bullshit. Likewise there are also generated hundred lines of code with tests that are subtlety wrong. Basically the challenge is fairly straightforward, if one side is machine-generated, and the other side is human-validated, the human loses 100% of the time. Either the machine has to be 100% accurate or very close to it, or the human needs tools to help him. As it stands, neither of those conditions is here yet
- mistrial9 4y ago
  this is well-said, in the case where correctness is required. But low-trust communications via low-profit activity like tech-support, cheap ads, help lines for government, and even some professional services.. won't care; Employers gain and employees are redundant, next! In those businesses, it is an old story that the cheapest, cruelest and most-scofflaw company wins.. not even debatable that is true.. so here comes MSFT to sell it to you.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  All these arguments about how it can be wrong are literally identical to the arguments I heard from ignorant people between 2001-2008 on why search engines were unsafe because Google could return wrong answers or steal your data. IMO the only people crapping on AI either don’t know how to prompt it correctly, aren’t very creative, or frankly weren’t doing that much work in the first place and feel threatened by it. I understand the need to protect intellectual property but 10 years from now there will be two types of companies: Those that embrace AI, and those that crashed and burned.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>employees going elsewhere That's strange to me. I'm employed in order to receive a paycheck. If receiving my paycheck is contingent on me not using ChatGPT, then so be it, what do I care?
- idopmstuff 4y ago
  Employees want to work with good tools and do interesting work. I'm at a small startup and get to spend a lot of my time working with AI - figuring out how we can use it internally, working out where we can integrate it into our product and using it myself to prototype things and automate some of our business processes. I am hugely fascinated and impressed by AI, and the fact that my work is paying me to spend time using this awesome tool in a real world context is suuuuuuuper good for my job satisfaction.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  Because many people will get away with it. Their paycheck is not contingent on not using ChatGPT, because their employer won't find out. Some people want their work to be high quality and/or done quicker. If there are tools to facilitate that, some people will be interested.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Depends. If suddenly my company said I was going to work on some deadend legacy crap for the next 5 years, I'm going to nope out ASAP. If you get fired/quit and any other job you're looking at is going to have you interacting with new languages or AI workflows or something like that you have to assess what value you're losing by working for that company and the risks associated with it.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > I'm employed in order to receive a paycheck. If receiving my paycheck is contingent on me not using ChatGPT, then so be it, what do I care? I can be employed to receive a paycheck by employers that give me freedom or employers that take away useful tools. Why do I stick with the employer that gives me less freedom? Not to mention, getting a new job almost always drastically increases the size of said paycheck.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Lol, going where exactly? Every big company has blocked or restricted ChatGPT from the day it became available.
tjr 4y ago
Companies banning the use of ChatGPT level tools going forward will find the rules either flouted, subverted or the employees going elsewhere. Why? Companies typically have many rules that they expect employees to follow. Why would employees disregard these particular rules, or even quit because of them?
- redmaverick 4y ago
  simple reason. I can refactor the codebase in a dozen different ways in a matter of seconds and choose the best one to work on. I can a summon a large volume of unit tests, descriptive logging statements etc. I can also just dump the logs and it will 9/10 times tell you right away what the issue is and how you can resolve it. i.e basically you can do a lot of work in just a matter of hours. Once you taste the productivity increase by integrating AI into your workflow you will miss it if it is taken out. not mention you can build all the handy little tools in a matter of seconds that will make your daily life way easier.
  - tjr 4y ago
    Employees have been prevented (by rule) from doing things that would make them more productive for a long time. For a trivial example, programmers who are proficient in Emacs not being allowed to install and use Emacs. I still fail to see why employees will now choose to disregard this particular rule, and either disobey or quit.
    - EFreethought 4y ago
      Honestly, "no Emacs" is one rule that would make me quit.
      - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
        So would I. Funnily enough I thought it might happen at a job in the past so I've thought through the "would you quit if work banned Emacs" question quite a bit.
    - 4y ago
reaperducer 4y ago
Pretty much the thought-devoid "It's new, so it must be good!" argument people have been pushing for centuries, whether it's music or technology or politics or fashion. Companies banning the use of ChatGPT level tools going forward will find the rules either flouted, subverted or the employees going elsewhere. If my employees are leaking company information through ChatGPT, I'm happy to have them go work for my competitors and leak their information, instead.
- mellosouls 4y ago
  Pretty much the thought-devoid "It's new, so it must be good!" argument If you think people are just hyping ChatGPT because its new without further reflection, you have stunningly missed the moment and have a rude awakening coming.
gnopgnip 4y ago
Or the company will pay for a similar tool that doesn't share the data externally.
- mellosouls 4y ago
  There is no similarly capable tool available presently. I agree that when it becomes an option, hosted or securely tunable solutions will be preferred in some cost/risk calculations.
vfacv 4y ago
Samsung is manufacturing real high-tech things, lots of them. GPT just launders things that other people have created. It isn't high-tech. What would impact the world economy more? OpenAI disappearing (no one would notice) or Samsung disappearing?
ipaddr 4y ago
I was with you until you said employees going elsewhere. There will be a group who needs to use it because they can't function without some AI assisted help but people working at the company know how to do their jobs already why leave?
loeg 4y ago
Do you think regular employees care all that much about ChatGPT? It's a cute toy. If my employer says not to use it for work data, that's just not a big deal for me.
Art9681 4y ago
They actually can. But not every business is competent. It is completely irresponsible to query public services with internal company intellectual property or any type of information that may breach your contract that you signed with a responsible and competent business. It is trivial to track you do on business equipment and if you think you're smart by subverting that by querying public methods through other means, that can and will be solve soon. Someone is going to make a lot of money deploying an AI system that can retroactively track these things and when that happens, for better or worse, hope you were not irresponsible and worked for a business with the technical acumen to trace you. It's not a matter of if it can be done, with today's tech. It's a matter of whether the business you worked for has the means and willpower to do it. My advice is follow best practice and wait for an official company policy detailing the use of these new services. Otherwise you may find yourself in legal trouble years from now when the traces you left can easily be uncovered by technology that does not forget.
refurb 4y ago
Nobody cares about ChatGPT where I work. Nobody is going to quit. The only use for AI is for writing code and the company created a policy around that.

bretticus 4y ago

Why? It’s a valid concern in my opinion. You’re feeding OpenAI your intellectual property and just hoping they don’t do anything with it. I have the same concerns with Microsoft’s TypeScript playground

Karawebnetwork 4y ago
It is a valid concern if you send an entire list of confidential data and ask it to transform that list. However if you ask ChatGPT some questions about coding in general it's no different than searching online.
- DANmode 4y ago
  Unless you feed it your proprietary code — something Samsung chip fabrication employees actually did.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  This comes down to whether you trust your whole organization to act be educated about these issues and be good at judging what's ok. At the size of Samsung that's just an impossible move, and it's easier to blanket ban a problematic service and have employee request exceptions justifying their use case. BTW I've been in companies that blanket ban posting stuff online, and got posts security reviewed when asking help on vendor community forums. That's totally a thing.
golergka 4y ago
Yes, 20 lines of transforming jsons from one form to another are exactly what OpenAI employees are looking for in all the data they're gathering. How will my company survive after they get their hands on this?
- babyshake 4y ago
  Good opsec/appsec requires doing things that seem unnecessary. And it depends on the context. Passing a private key or raw text customer password to any type of online tool is never a good idea.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  You'd be surprised how much load bearing software could be reduced to 20 lines of data transforms, or less.
armchairhacker 4y ago
It's like WFH/in-office. Some people care and some don't, you're removing the ones who care. Personally I haven't used GPT much so I wouldn't mind, but banning copilot would make me reconsider.

NhanH 4y ago

It’s not clear whether ChatGPT and the likes would increase productivity at the organization level. And I am talking about the current GPT-4, not some hypothetical AGI. From what I have seen, a large swath of usages are basically just people DDOSing their teams with a lot of words. Things like someone in a marketing team prompting for a “detailed 10-week plan with actual numbers” that naturally have no basis on reality, but will take a lot of effort from their team to decipher the bullshit. Likewise there are also generated hundred lines of code with tests that are subtlety wrong. Basically the challenge is fairly straightforward, if one side is machine-generated, and the other side is human-validated, the human loses 100% of the time. Either the machine has to be 100% accurate or very close to it, or the human needs tools to help him. As it stands, neither of those conditions is here yet

mistrial9 4y ago
this is well-said, in the case where correctness is required. But low-trust communications via low-profit activity like tech-support, cheap ads, help lines for government, and even some professional services.. won't care; Employers gain and employees are redundant, next! In those businesses, it is an old story that the cheapest, cruelest and most-scofflaw company wins.. not even debatable that is true.. so here comes MSFT to sell it to you.
oceanplexian 4y ago
All these arguments about how it can be wrong are literally identical to the arguments I heard from ignorant people between 2001-2008 on why search engines were unsafe because Google could return wrong answers or steal your data. IMO the only people crapping on AI either don’t know how to prompt it correctly, aren’t very creative, or frankly weren’t doing that much work in the first place and feel threatened by it. I understand the need to protect intellectual property but 10 years from now there will be two types of companies: Those that embrace AI, and those that crashed and burned.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4y ago

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>employees going elsewhere That's strange to me. I'm employed in order to receive a paycheck. If receiving my paycheck is contingent on me not using ChatGPT, then so be it, what do I care?

idopmstuff 4y ago
Employees want to work with good tools and do interesting work. I'm at a small startup and get to spend a lot of my time working with AI - figuring out how we can use it internally, working out where we can integrate it into our product and using it myself to prototype things and automate some of our business processes. I am hugely fascinated and impressed by AI, and the fact that my work is paying me to spend time using this awesome tool in a real world context is suuuuuuuper good for my job satisfaction.
unethical_ban 4y ago
Because many people will get away with it. Their paycheck is not contingent on not using ChatGPT, because their employer won't find out. Some people want their work to be high quality and/or done quicker. If there are tools to facilitate that, some people will be interested.
pixl97 4y ago
Depends. If suddenly my company said I was going to work on some deadend legacy crap for the next 5 years, I'm going to nope out ASAP. If you get fired/quit and any other job you're looking at is going to have you interacting with new languages or AI workflows or something like that you have to assess what value you're losing by working for that company and the risks associated with it.
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> I'm employed in order to receive a paycheck. If receiving my paycheck is contingent on me not using ChatGPT, then so be it, what do I care? I can be employed to receive a paycheck by employers that give me freedom or employers that take away useful tools. Why do I stick with the employer that gives me less freedom? Not to mention, getting a new job almost always drastically increases the size of said paycheck.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Lol, going where exactly? Every big company has blocked or restricted ChatGPT from the day it became available.

tjr 4y ago

Companies banning the use of ChatGPT level tools going forward will find the rules either flouted, subverted or the employees going elsewhere. Why? Companies typically have many rules that they expect employees to follow. Why would employees disregard these particular rules, or even quit because of them?

redmaverick 4y ago
simple reason. I can refactor the codebase in a dozen different ways in a matter of seconds and choose the best one to work on. I can a summon a large volume of unit tests, descriptive logging statements etc. I can also just dump the logs and it will 9/10 times tell you right away what the issue is and how you can resolve it. i.e basically you can do a lot of work in just a matter of hours. Once you taste the productivity increase by integrating AI into your workflow you will miss it if it is taken out. not mention you can build all the handy little tools in a matter of seconds that will make your daily life way easier.
- tjr 4y ago
  Employees have been prevented (by rule) from doing things that would make them more productive for a long time. For a trivial example, programmers who are proficient in Emacs not being allowed to install and use Emacs. I still fail to see why employees will now choose to disregard this particular rule, and either disobey or quit.
  - EFreethought 4y ago
    Honestly, "no Emacs" is one rule that would make me quit.
    - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
      So would I. Funnily enough I thought it might happen at a job in the past so I've thought through the "would you quit if work banned Emacs" question quite a bit.
  - 4y ago

reaperducer 4y ago

Pretty much the thought-devoid "It's new, so it must be good!" argument people have been pushing for centuries, whether it's music or technology or politics or fashion. Companies banning the use of ChatGPT level tools going forward will find the rules either flouted, subverted or the employees going elsewhere. If my employees are leaking company information through ChatGPT, I'm happy to have them go work for my competitors and leak their information, instead.

mellosouls 4y ago
Pretty much the thought-devoid "It's new, so it must be good!" argument If you think people are just hyping ChatGPT because its new without further reflection, you have stunningly missed the moment and have a rude awakening coming.

gnopgnip 4y ago

Or the company will pay for a similar tool that doesn't share the data externally.

mellosouls 4y ago
There is no similarly capable tool available presently. I agree that when it becomes an option, hosted or securely tunable solutions will be preferred in some cost/risk calculations.

vfacv 4y ago

Samsung is manufacturing real high-tech things, lots of them. GPT just launders things that other people have created. It isn't high-tech. What would impact the world economy more? OpenAI disappearing (no one would notice) or Samsung disappearing?

ipaddr 4y ago

I was with you until you said employees going elsewhere. There will be a group who needs to use it because they can't function without some AI assisted help but people working at the company know how to do their jobs already why leave?

loeg 4y ago

Do you think regular employees care all that much about ChatGPT? It's a cute toy. If my employer says not to use it for work data, that's just not a big deal for me.

Art9681 4y ago

They actually can. But not every business is competent. It is completely irresponsible to query public services with internal company intellectual property or any type of information that may breach your contract that you signed with a responsible and competent business. It is trivial to track you do on business equipment and if you think you're smart by subverting that by querying public methods through other means, that can and will be solve soon. Someone is going to make a lot of money deploying an AI system that can retroactively track these things and when that happens, for better or worse, hope you were not irresponsible and worked for a business with the technical acumen to trace you. It's not a matter of if it can be done, with today's tech. It's a matter of whether the business you worked for has the means and willpower to do it. My advice is follow best practice and wait for an official company policy detailing the use of these new services. Otherwise you may find yourself in legal trouble years from now when the traces you left can easily be uncovered by technology that does not forget.

refurb 4y ago

Nobody cares about ChatGPT where I work. Nobody is going to quit. The only use for AI is for writing code and the company created a policy around that.