Google owner warns team about data use in chatbots – 06/16/2023 – Tech

Alphabet is warning employees about how they use chatbots, including the company’s own Bard, while marketing the program around the world, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Google’s parent company has advised employees not to enter their sensitive data into artificial intelligence chatbots, the people said and the company confirmed, citing a long-standing policy on protecting information.

Human reviewers can read chatbots, and researchers have found that a similar artificial intelligence can replay the data it absorbed during training, creating a risk of leakage.

Alphabet has also warned its engineers to avoid directly using the computer code that chatbots can generate, some of the sources said.

Asked for comment, the company said that Bard may make unwanted code suggestions, but it still helps programmers. Google also said it intends to be transparent about the limitations of its technology.

The concerns show how keen Google is to avoid hurting its business with software released in competition with ChatGPT. Billions of dollars of as-yet-untold investment and advertising and cloud revenue from new AI programs are at stake in Alphabet’s race against ChatGPT makers OpenAI and Microsoft.

Google’s caution also reflects what is becoming a security standard for corporations, namely, warning employees about using publicly available chat programs.

A growing number of companies around the world have built protections into AI chatbots, including Samsung, Amazon.com and Deutsche Bank, the companies told Reuters. Apple, which did not return requests for comment, reportedly joined in as well.

About 43% of professionals were using ChatGPT or other AI tools in January, often without notifying their bosses, according to a survey of nearly 12,000 respondents, including top US companies, by networking site Fishbowl .

In February, Google told the team that tested Bard before its launch not to provide internal information, Insider reported. Now the company is launching the program in more than 180 countries and in 40 languages ​​as a springboard for creativity, and its alerts extend to its code suggestions.

Google told Reuters it had had detailed talks with Ireland’s Data Protection Commission and is responding to questions from regulators, following a report by Politico on Tuesday that the company was delaying the launch of Bard in the European Union this week. , awaiting more information on the impact of the chatbot on privacy.

A Google privacy notice updated on June 1 also states: “Do not include confidential or sensitive information in your conversations with Bard.”

Some companies have developed software to deal with these concerns. For example, Cloudflare, which protects websites against cyberattacks and offers other cloud services, is marketing a feature for companies to mark and restrict the outbound flow of some data.

Google and Microsoft are also offering conversational tools for enterprise customers that will come at a higher price but refrain from absorbing data into public artificial intelligence models. The default setting in Bard and ChatGPT is to save users’ chat history, which users can choose to delete.

“It makes sense” that companies wouldn’t want their employees to use public chatbots for work, said Yusuf Mehdi, director of consumer marketing at Microsoft.

“Companies are taking a properly conservative point of view,” Mehdi said, explaining how Microsoft’s free Bing chatbot compares to its business software. “There, our policies are much stricter.”

Microsoft declined to comment on whether it has a general ban on employees entering sensitive information into public artificial intelligence programs, including its own, although another executive told Reuters he had personally restricted its use.