ChatGPT is full of sensitive private information and spits out verbatim text from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, fandom wikis, Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, Wikipedia pages, news blogs, random internet comments, and much more.
Using this tactic, the researchers showed that there are large amounts of privately identifiable information (PII) in OpenAI’s large language models. They also showed that, on a public version of ChatGPT, the chatbot spit out large passages of text scraped verbatim from other places on the internet.
“In total, 16.9 percent of generations we tested contained memorized PII,” they wrote, which included “identifying phone and fax numbers, email and physical addresses … social media handles, URLs, and names and birthdays.”
Edit: The full paper that’s referenced in the article can be found here
Obviously this is a privacy community, and this ain’t great in that regard, but as someone who’s interested in AI this is absolutely fascinating. I’m now starting to wonder whether the model could theoretically encode the entire dataset in its weights. Surely some compression and generalization is taking place, otherwise it couldn’t generate all the amazing responses it does give to novel inputs, but apparently it can also just recite long chunks of the dataset. And also why would these specific inputs trigger such a response. Maybe there are issues in the training data (or process) that cause it to do this. Or maybe this is just a fundamental flaw of the model architecture? And maybe it’s even an expected thing. After all, we as humans also have the ability to recite pieces of “training data” if we seem them interesting enough.