According to news on January 25, since the artificial intelligence research company OpenAI released the AI chat robot ChatGPT in November 2022, the latter has been popular in the technology field, but the technology giant Amazon is full of vigilance.Even warned employees not to share confidential information with ChatGPT.
Amazon’s internal Slack channel has many employee questions about how to use ChatGPT. Some employees asked Amazon if there were official guidelines for using ChatGPT on work devices. Others wondered if they were allowed to work with AI tools. An employee is urging Amazon’s cloud computing division, AWS, to clarify its stance on using “generative AI (AIGC) tools.”
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Soon, an Amazon corporate lawyer joined the discussion.A screenshot of the internal communication in the Slack channel shows,The lawyer warned employees not to provide ChatGPT with “any Amazon confidential information,” including Amazon code being written. He also advised employees to follow the company’s existing non-disclosure policy, as some of ChatGPT’s responses looked very similar to Amazon’s internal situation.
The lawyer wrote: “It is of the utmost importance thatBecause your input may be used as iterative training data for ChatGPT, we don’t want its output to contain or resemble our secret information.”
These exchanges suggest that the sudden emergence of ChatGPT has raised many new ethical questions.ChatGPT is a conversational AI tool that responds to queries with clearer, smarter answers.The rapid proliferation of ChatGPT has the potential to disrupt several industries, including media, academia, and healthcare, prompting efforts to find new use cases for chatbots and their possible impact.
How employees share confidential information with ChatGPT, and what its developer, OpenAI, does with it could become a thorny issue. That’s especially important for Amazon, since archrival Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, including a new funding round this week that reportedly totals $10 billion.
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Emily Bender, who teaches computational linguistics at the University of Washington, said: “OpenAI is far from transparent about how it uses data, but if the data is used for training, I expect companies to think: After several months of widespread use of ChatGPT, is it possible to obtain confidential information of a private company through carefully crafted prompts?”
Amazon has many internal safeguards for employees using ChatGPT. For example, screenshots of the exchange show that when employees use work devices to access the ChatGPT website, a warning message pops up saying they are about to access a third-party service that “may not be approved for use by Amazon Security.”
Employees participating in the Slack channel chat said they could bypass the message simply by clicking on the “Acknowledge” tab. Staff speculated that the warning popup was to prevent employees from pasting confidential information onto ChatGPT, especially since they hadn’t seen the company’s policy on internal use.
Still, some Amazon employees are already using AI tools as software “coding assistants” to help improve internal lines of code. “I think it would be great to have this functionality out of the box right now, I think! So any guidance would be great,” an Amazon employee wrote on a Slack channel.
worried and excited
Another employee said he shared Amazon’s interview questions for an open programming position on ChatGPT. According to the employee’s Slack post, the AI model provided the correct solutions to several of the technical problems. “I’m both concerned and excited to see what impact this will have on the way we conduct coding interviews,” he said.
Overall, Amazon employees participating in Slack channel chats were excited about the potential of ChatGPT and wondered if Amazon was developing a competing product. Lawyer for company warning employees not to use ChatGPT says,Amazon is accelerating development of “similar technology”citing voice assistant Alexa and code recommendation service CodeWhisperer as examples.
An AWS employee wrote that the Enterprise Support team recently formed a small internal working group to “understand the impact of advanced chat AI on our business.” Research shows that ChatGPT is “very good” at answering AWS support questions, including resolving Aurora database issues, among others. At the same time, it is also excellent in creating training materials for the AWS Certified Cloud Architect exam, addressing the client’s company goals.
‘Far from being transparent’
According to Bender of the University of Washington,Growing use of ChatGPT at work raises serious questionshow OpenAI plans to use materials shared with AI tools.
OpenAI’s terms of service require users to agree that it can use all input and output generated by users and ChatGPT. It also said that OpenAI removed all personally identifiable information (PII) from the data it used.
But Bender says it’s hard to see how OpenAI could identify and delete all personal information, given ChatGPT’s rapidly growing scale, which surpassed 1 million users within a week of its launch. What’s more, a company’s intellectual property may not be part of the definition of PII.
For Amazon employees, data privacy appears to be the least of their concerns. Using chatbots at work has increased productivity by a factor of 10, they say, and many are hoping to join an internal team developing a similar service.
“If there are plans to build a similar service now, I would very much like to be a part of it and contribute a little bit if needed,” one of the employees wrote on Slack.