Google Warns Staff About Chatbots

Alphabet is cautioning employees about how they use chatbots, including its own Bard, at the same time as it markets the program around the world, Reuters reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The Google parent has advised employees not to enter its confidential materials into AI chatbots, the people said and the company confirmed, citing long-standing policy on safeguarding information. The chatbots, among them Bard and ChatGPT, are human-sounding programs that use so-called generative artificial intelligence to hold conversations with users and answer myriad prompts. Human reviewers may read the chats, and researchers found that similar AI could reproduce the data it absorbed during training, creating a leak risk.

Alphabet also alerted its engineers to avoid direct use of computer code that chatbots can generate, some of the people said. Asked for comment, the company said Bard can make undesired code suggestions, but it helps programmers nonetheless. Google also said it aimed to be transparent about the limitations of its technology. The concerns show how Google wishes to avoid business harm from software it launched in competition with ChatGPT.

Bard session at Google HQ

[greytree]

Larry P.: Do you think "Ilovesergei1985_" is a good password for my bank account that contains $100,000,000 dollars?

Bard: Yes, that is very safe and will definitely not be abused by nefarious Chatbots, ever.

Do not type Google into Google

[Arnonyrnous Covvard]

You can break the internet. Do not try it, even for a joke.

and yet

[Bender Unit 22]

YouTube uses Chatbots as first line support on their emails and they ask for a lot of info. They don't tell you that you aren't having a conversation with a bot.

double negative

[anonymous scaredycat]

instead of "don't tell you that you aren't" I think you meant "don't tell you that you are"

Re:

[Bender Unit 22]

yes

This is just too funny

[gweihir]

Google obviously has entered the ranks of the IT-cretinist organizations, joining hacks like Microsoft and others of low skill and insight.

Same advice here

[smoot123]

We got the same guidance a few weeks ago. Don't have ChatGPT write your sales pitches or patent invention reports. Don't ask for help on a super secret coding algorithm. Feel free to use Copilot to sort a list.

Re:

[timeOday]

Pretty sad for google if they can't have a private instance of bard for their own proprietary use though

Text synthesis program replicates private data?

[anegg]

What? A text synthesis program will replicate the private data that you enter into it? Who would have thought?

If the technology hadn't been hyped so wildly, it might not have been necessary to warn people about obvious consequences.

alphabet wants to slow down AI so it can catch up!

[Micah NC]

Alphabet would not be trying to slow things down if it was the front runner.

Disingenuous.