Extractive Labour from Users, Intellectual Property / Copyright & Privacy Issues

Ignoring longstanding calls of AI ethicists, ChatGPT and other LLMs are systems that fail to proactively address harms before being released to the public. Instead, they rely on extractive labour from users to test and improve the platform (like the thumbs up or down feature in ChatGPT). This adds significant commercial value to these products through the free, or even paying, crowdsourced labour of their users.

Intellectual property and copyright issues have also been flagged, given the output from ChatGPT becomes a user’s own intellectual property despite the fact that this information has been deconstructed and reassembled from many other sources or semantic patterns of others’ intellectual labour. Copyright concerns have been particularly expressed for AI image generators that turn text-based prompts into new, “original” images, which may, in fact, draw substantially from preexisting images and creative works produced by others without citation or respect of copyright terms.

Privacy issues are also a concern. In Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models, DeepMind authors write, “By providing true information about individuals’ personal characteristics, privacy violations may occur. […] Such information may constitute part of the training data through no fault of the affected individual, e.g. where data leaks occur or where others post private information about them on online networks.”

While ChatGPT seems to be taking steps to address these issues, when asking it directly what the privacy risks are to ChatGPT, it identified the following:

• Data breaches: Although ChatGPT does not collect or store personal information, the server or platform that hosts the AI model could be vulnerable to data breaches or hacking attacks, which could expose user data.
• Unintended disclosure: Chatbots like ChatGPT can sometimes misinterpret user input or provide inaccurate responses, which could inadvertently reveal sensitive or confidential information.
• Third-party access: ChatGPT may use third-party APIs or services to provide certain functionalities or integrate with other applications, which could potentially expose user data to those third-party providers.

Read more: 

• AI And The Copyright Problem
• He Used AI to Publish a Children’s Book in a Weekend. Artists Are Not Happy About It
• Generative AI ChatGPT Can Disturbingly Goggle Up your Private and Confidential Data, Forewarns AI Ethics and AI Law
• Everyone should decide how their digital data are used — not just tech companies
• The Steep Cost Of Capture
• Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms
• Podcast: The Trust Engineers
• ChatGPT’s Privacy Policy