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Google warns staff about chatbots
- pg_1234 3y agohttps://archive.ph/OMjSz https://archive.ph/OMjSz
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y agoI want to say it is not a surprise to anyone here. You need to vet the code generated and a lot more people than I feared copy and paste without considering what the code does. What is surprising is that it is happening at Google, where people are supposed to smarter than your average bear ( to the point where they had to issue an internal memo ). Naturally, you could also interpret it as an indictment of its own tool ( Bard ).
- ceejayoz 3y ago> What is surprising is that it is happening at Google, where people are supposed to smarter than your average bear ( to the point where they had to issue an internal memo ). Only takes a couple to be a big risk. Being smart and having common sense aren't the same thing; remember, Google's where an engineer fell in love with a chatbot and decided it was sentient. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...)
- jjoonathan 3y agoObvious internal memos / training often happen more for the purpose of excuse removal than for actually informing anyone.
- bagacrap 3y ago"smart" is often used as a synonym for "lazy"
- mdavidn 3y agoGoogle's concern here is not the output of generative AI (though that's certainly an open legal question) but the input. Coding assistance requires the transmission of context, such as internal source code around an edit, to the AI model. That third-party service may record such prompts and use them as examples to train the next generation of the model.
- activiation 3y agoIts about leaking info and not about using code generated by said AI chatbot
- CSMastermind 3y agoI initially thought that maybe they were concerned about license violations, copyright infringement, etc. because you can't always be sure where the llms are sourcing their information from. But rather it seems like they're warning against information leaking out? > 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. Is there any example of this happening in the real world? I've never heard of one. Even if you were to give me access to some google source code free and clear I'm not sure what I could do with it. It's often only useful with the build systems, other services, external documentation, and tribal knowledge contained within the company. Sure if I had unfettered access to all of the Google source for a product for long enough I might be able to find a security vulnerability or something but random chunks of code pieced together from the inputs to some chat bot? Just seems like an impractical attack vector.
- extr 3y agoI think it's way more banal than that. Think someone in HR asking it for format a list of salaries. Boring stuff.
- lkjdsklf 3y ago> Just seems like an impractical attack vector. It's not really about security in terms of attacking the site. It's purely about IP protection and potentially leaking user/employee data. Any data you give one of these chat bots can potentially be regurgitated by the bot later. We have the same kind of policies at my megacorp company. We can't even use things like chrome extensions that will let you paste in data to parse json or things like that.
- capitainenemo 3y agoParse json? Like... the built-in JSON formatting that Firefox has when hitting a JSON url or local json file? I'm rather surprised those are considered an attack vector, but I guess the concern is the extension might be running remotely?
- bluefishinit 3y agoCouldn't this same argument be used to warn staff about entering data into Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Cloud...? None of those are end-to-end encrypted and companies using them are "leaking" their info to Google.
- EscapeFromNY 3y agoYes it could. If you're working at a company you shouldn't upload your company's secrets to ChatGPT, Bard, Google, Microsoft, Zoho, Discord, Telegram, Pastebin, or any service unless the service is approved first.
- summerlight 3y agoThose services have some sort of legal bounds that they're not going to use user data for "improving services" while ChatGPT and Bard explicitly state that they're going to use user data for model training. So you need to use a paid subscription plan but why are they going to pay for their competitor's service (Google doesn't have a paid chatbot service yet), which is going to be a PR disaster? Prohibition is a much simpler solution.
- bluefishinit 3y ago> Those services have some sort of legal bounds that they're not going to use user data for "improving services" I don't think this is true. Quite the opposite, they can do what they want with your data including training models with data you've given them in the past.
- summerlight 3y agoAny evidence, more than "they will do because they can do"? Technically, they can do that, but only if they think it's a great idea to play with a relentless stream of lawsuits where some of them may put their business into existential threats.
- bluefishinit 3y ago
- hgsgm 3y agoDon't send business data to random websites. This is not news.
- pessimizer 3y agoYou would think, but people will call you a paranoiac for saying it. Right now, somebody at google is trying to figure out how to sneakily use ChatGPT with confidential data and not get caught.
- Kiro 3y ago> Some 43% of professionals were using ChatGPT or other AI tools as of January That's way higher than I would have thought.
- krn 3y agoWell, "AI tools" can have a pretty wide meaning. Isn't Grammarly[1] an "AI tool", for instance? [1] https://www.grammarly.com/ https://www.grammarly.com/
- tmpz22 3y agoSpellcheck? Ad blockers? Spam filters? 87% of people believe AI hype has gotten out of hand.
- mywittyname 3y agoIt's taken the business world by storm. Practically everyone I know outside of tech has their managers asking how it can be used to improve their productivity.
- nl_jaded 3y agoYeah it’s an incredibly high security risk, employees are pasting company code inside chatGPT to help solve their problems. Such a stupid thing to do.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI fear the output these things make more than the possibility of them stealing my input. I think it's opening companies up to incredible risks of accidental copyright violation.
- stainablesteel 3y agoits no different than not putting it into a search engine microsoft is collect chatgpt info like google collects info off searches
- mrtksn 3y agoIt's quite different, ChatGPT doesn't point you a source, it generates output specifically for your use case. Often times you will explain why it needs to do what and you will use real data. This can leak stuff like future markets and products, which is highly confidential most of the time. They probably use Google at Google anyway.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoIf I recall when I first started at Google in 2011 my workstation had some kind of background clipboard management which prevented certain classes of copying between browser sessions, etc. In a similar fashion if you accidentally typed your password into a non-Google service, it would notice and expire that password. (I can't recall if this was only at the browser level, or if it happened in terminal sessions, too.) Later they loosened up some of the latter stuff because the importance and weight of passwords themselves was reduced. (I also started just a few months before they implemented the e-mail "expiry" policy which prevented people from keeping old emails, cuz, y'know, they kept leaving stupid paper trails there that got them in legal trouble.)
- lisasays 3y agoUnfortunately, no -- the scale is vastly different.
- stainablesteel 3y agofrom the standpoint of the input, its all the same you can infer what disease someone might have, what they're doing based on their searches/queries, what they want to buy, etc
- LeicaLatte 3y agoGoogle enforcing information hygiene, good to see.
- chrisdbanks 3y agoTwo scenarios: - they're trying to prevent proprietary knowledge leaking; - they're trying to prevent dodgy shit they're doing leaking. My guess is the second as it's highly unlikely that they have any proprietary knowledge that would give their competitors a significant advantage to know. Most large companies' strategies are fairly obvious from the outside and proprietary knowledge leaks through employees moving. It's the dodgy shit they're doing that can damage them.
- HWR_14 3y agoThird and fourth scenarios: - The risks (technical, legal) of using AI generated code are not worth assuming. - They pay a lot of talent a lot of money. Efficiency isn't that important to them. Heck, over-employing talent to prevent them from working for start ups that might compete may be worth it to them.
- lisasays 3y ago"Tobacco companies caution employees against smoking"
- mgraczyk 3y agoYou should read the article. Google is not claiming that LLMs will harm employees. Google is claiming that sending confidential data to third parties is not allowed and will leak that information. A more apt quote would be "Tobacco companies caution employees against giving cigarette recipe to competitors"
- lisasays 3y agoGoogle is not claiming that LLMs will harm employees. The infinitely bigger point is that this company is gladly pushing out a suite of products that it knows perfectly well to be carry a significant risk of harm. Of course the harm in this case is done to the -companies- where it is used, not the employees. But that's just a minor, and entirely tangential detail. You should read the article. I'm sorry that the pervasive toxicity of this industry has rubbed off on you to such an extent that feel you need lash out at others in this way.
- mgraczyk 3y agoThe linked article has nothing to do with the harms of LLMs on the users of LLMs. Saying something like "Google is harming users and saying that their employees shouldn't be subjected to this harm" is misleading and off topic.
- lisasays 3y agoAgreed. Only problem is -- the one saying these things (or by this point deliberately misreading what was said) is you, not me. I believe it was clear enough from the original snippet that the "smoking" is being done by the companies / organizations that choose to use the products -- not the employees.
- 0max 3y agoProbably because of the big goof that happened at Samsung with their proprietary sauce back in April https://mashable.com/article/samsung-chatgpt-leak-details https://mashable.com/article/samsung-chatgpt-leak-details
- hgsgm 3y agoObviously not because of that. Google has had a "no leak" for decades before that incident.
- still_grokking 3y agoBesides the obvious recommendation not to input sensitive or private data into someone else's computers, I think the following is quite interesting: > Alphabet also alerted its engineers to avoid direct use of computer code that chatbots can generate, some of the people said. It's telling, and says imho a lot about the "quality" of AI generated code.
- AHOHA 3y agoWarning its employees from using chatbots for anything productive and entering sensitive information, yet recommending and marketing their chatbot for the public..