An Amazon corporate lawyer has warned company employees not to provide “any Amazon confidential information” to ChatGPT, reports from BusinessInsider. These injunctions come after finding that, in some cases, ChatGPT responses were uncannily similar to Amazon’s internal data.
“This is important because your inputs can be used as training data for a new iteration of ChatGPT.” This is what the lawyer says in her message to the workers. In addition, she continues with “we don’t want your results to include or look like our sensitive information (and I’ve already seen cases where your result closely matches existing material).”
In addition, the statements by the company’s lawyer raise red flags in the transparency of ChatGPT. The way in which the chatbot shares information with its creators, OpenAI, could become an important topic in the future. In fact, now that Microsoft is one of the main investors in the project, the issue of corporate privacy has become very relevant for Amazon.
Emily Bender, professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, shares her doubts regarding this tool. “After a few months of widespread use of ChatGPT, will it be possible to extract private information from companies with cleverly crafted messages?”
ChatGPT has become the main ally of Amazon workers
But what would Amazon workers use ChatGPT for? Well recently, an internal Slack channel at Amazon was filled with questions from employees. Here, many expressed their doubts about the chatbot, since more and more company workers use it as a code assistant. Thanks to ChatGPT, many Amazon staff have improved internal lines of code.
This was reported by the aforementioned medium, and it is that one of the benefits of the chatbot is precisely in the area of computer code generation. In fact, one of the employees even put ChatGPT to the test by doing an Amazon-style interview for a coding position. The artificial intelligence correctly answered all the technical questions, the employee commented on Slack.
Introducing Amazon CodeWhisperer
Is the petition a step back for Amazon workers? Although ChatGPT has become a great ally difficult to replace, Amazon is already working on “very similar technology.” This was stated by the lawyer, citing the virtual assistant Alexa and the CodeWhisperer service.
Meanwhile, although ChatGPT is not banned in Amazon offices, workers who access it from the company’s connection will see a notice that “it may not be approved for use by Amazon security.” Still, it’s an easy message to jump through with the click of a button, say employees at Slack.