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A European friend of mine told me about some of the problems of mock data generation. A hard one, at least for the legal requirements in her field, is that it
by eesmith 2y ago
A European friend of mine told me about some of the problems of mock data generation.
A hard one, at least for the legal requirements in her field, is that it must not include a real person's information.
Like, if it says "John Smith, 123 Oak St." and someone actually lives there with that name, then it's a privacy violation.
You end up having to use addresses that specifically do not exist, and driver's license numbers which are invalid, etc.
- mungoman2 2y agoSurely that's only their interpretation of privacy laws, and not something tested in courts. It seems unlikely to actually break regulations if it's clear that the data has been fished out of the entropy well.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoBut if "fished out of the entropy well" includes "a direct copy of something which should not have been in the training data in the first place, like a corporate HR document," then that's a big problem. I don't think AI providers get to hide behind an "entropy well" defense when that entropy is a direct consequence of AI professionals' greed and laziness around data governance.
- eesmith 2y agoThe conversation was about 15 years ago so my memory might be wrong. But if you happen to have an SSN correctly matching someone's name, can you say it's been fished out of the entropy well? As aithrowawaycomm commented, how can you know it didn't regurgitate part of the training set, which happened to contain real data?