ChatGPT Data Scraping and Privacy Concerns

ChatGPT has been dominating headlines since its introduction, consistently passing new milestones and expanding its breadth of knowledge. But what exactly is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT Is a Refined AI Chatbot

Created by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a sophisticated artificial intelligence chatbot that not only responds to questions posed to it, but also gives helpful breakdowns explaining its answers. Some readers may recognize the name OpenAI because they are also the brain trust behind DALL-E, a popular artificial intelligence that generates digital art images from natural language prompts, and Codex, the power behind Gitub, an Internet hosting service for software development.

ChatGPT skyrocketed to prominence as a result of a number of factors. First, ChatGPT is incredibly easy to use. A natural language artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT allows users to pose their questions in plain English. Once the user has asked their question, ChatGPT responds in natural language as well. Users can then even ask follow-up questions referring to the preceding questions, which gives users the semblance of have a conversation with the chatbot. Secondly, ChatGPT is free. Users need only register an account on the website to begin using the bot. Lastly, ChatGPT has also proven to be accurate.

How Accurate Is ChatGPT?

Since its inception, ChatGPT has been able to solve a wide variety of challenges that range anywhere from fixing computer code to authoring multi-paragraph essays. Contrast this with Google’s competing artificial intelligence bot that was launched after ChatGPT. Famously, on launch day, Bard made a mistake in answering one of its first prompts, mistaking discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope with pictures taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

This reveals the intrinsic tension behind such machine learning artificial intelligence bots that rely on web crawling and data scraping. These complex bots rapidly search the Internet for information to power their responses. Not only does this run the risk of regurgitating wrong information to an innocent user posing a question, it also means that data you put there can become part of the monolith of information these bots consume. 

Chatbot Data Scraping

As these products are proprietary, it is unclear what sort of vetting these bots may do when it comes to the information gathered. As such, your blogs, your public social media profiles, and potentially any public musing may be fair game to the emerging market of artificial intelligence bots looking to answer your questions. Remember, because these bots are scouring the Internet, they can look at anything on it. Thus, if you want to look up someone not famous, you can ask these bots to find contact information listed for that name. You can ask them who lives at a certain address. You can even ask who was recently fired from a law firm. And this does not even begin to address the myriad ways your data may be used.

Overall, what one must understand is that the emergence of these bots mean that Internet data is being consumed, scraped, and analyzed in even more ways than before. Data privacy attorneys should consider the ways sensitive information may be utilized, stored, or accessed. Similarly, attorneys should consider writing ironclad terms of use/service, privacy, disclaimer, usage, and similar provisions or policies for clients entering this field.

Key Takeaways on ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a cutting-edge artificial intelligence bot that can respond to natural language inquiries posed by users. The overwhelming popularity of ChatGPT means:

• We can expect an explosion in the artificial intelligence sector which should lead technology and privacy attorneys to consider crafting important policies or language provisions to address such use;

• Any citizen’s data, information, work, etc., that is searchable on the Internet is now fair game for these bots; and

• New privacy and misappropriation concerns will arise.

For more information about internet privacy, see our Technology & Data and Industry Focused Legal Solutions pages.