It feels like we have a new privacy threat that’s emerged in the past few years, and this year especially. I kind of think of the privacy threats over the past few decades as happening in waves of:
- First we were concerned about governments spying on us. The way we fought back (and continue to fight back) was through encrypted and secure protocols.
- Then we were concerned about corporations (Big Tech) taking our data and selling it to advertisers to target us with ads, or otherwise manipulate us. This is still a hard battle being fought, but we’re fighting it mostly by avoiding Big Tech (“De-Googling”, switching from social media to communities, etc.).
- Now we’re in a new wave. Big Tech is now building massive GPTs (ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc.) and it’s all trained on our data. Our reddit posts and Stack Overflow posts and maybe even our Mastodon or Lemmy posts! Unlike with #2, avoiding Big Tech doesn’t help, since they can access our posts no matter where we post them.
So for that third one…what do we do? Anything that’s online is fair game to be used to train the new crop of GPTs. Is this a battle that you personally care a lot about, or are you okay with GPTs being trained on stuff you’ve provided? If you do care, do you think there’s any reasonable way we can fight back? Can we poison their training data somehow?
That’s because you don’t understand the tool you are using and use tech-sounding language in the wrong context to look like you do.
GPT models generate text based on the patterns of the tokens it learned during training. The URL it gives you doesn’t work because they have to only look legit. It’s all statistical patterns.
It’s not because they fed it garbage during the semi-supervised training, it’s because that literally is what the tool is meant for. Use the right tool like google scholar if what you need are sources.