Speaker 1: Welcome to tech stuff. This is tech Support. I'm os
Speaker 1: Valoshin and I'm here with Cara Price.
Speaker 2: Hey us, Hey Karra.
Speaker 1: So today we wanted to talk about this chatchypt feature,
Speaker 1: which is now defunct, but our friends at four or
Speaker 1: Form Media had a story with the headline nearly one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand chatchypt conversations were searchable on Google. And as
Speaker 1: soon as that email hit my in box, before I'd
Speaker 1: even read it, I've forwarded it to you and to
Speaker 1: our producer Eliza, and I said, let's jump on this.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, part of it is that it taps
Speaker 3: into this fear that we all have about our most
Speaker 3: intimate thoughts being made public. This isn't like having a
Speaker 3: private Instagram account. This is very much between us and
Speaker 3: chat gpt. It's a little bit like talking in our sleep.
Speaker 3: And I think most people who have played around with
Speaker 3: a chatbot have some questions or responses that they'd rather
Speaker 3: the general public be blind to. I know I have
Speaker 3: my fair share.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We did that piece recently with Kashmir Hill about AI
Speaker 1: induced psychosis and the guy who'd fallen into the rabbit
Speaker 1: hole by talking with chat Gibt about whether or not
Speaker 1: he might be living in a simulation. So I started
Speaker 1: talking about chat gpt with this to see if I
Speaker 1: would also be taking down the rabbit hole, and then
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: I want this to be made public at a later date.
Speaker 1: So yeah, open Ai says they're now working with Google
Speaker 1: to scrape these conversations off the web, but of course
Speaker 1: some quick thinkers have already archived them.
Speaker 2: And I can't help but be rather.
Speaker 1: Curious about what it is that people are talking to
Speaker 1: chat Gibt about.
Speaker 3: I mean, obviously, we do have a segment at the
Speaker 3: end of every Friday episode called Chat and Me about
Speaker 3: how our listeners are really using their chatbots, and now
Speaker 3: we have hundreds of thousands of additional responses to explore.
Speaker 1: Of course, there's a difference between how our listeners tell
Speaker 1: us they're using chambots and the reality which apparent from
Speaker 1: these logs, and one researcher was actually created a data
Speaker 1: set of all the responses that were indexed by Google,
Speaker 1: and again our friends at four or four Media were
Speaker 1: able to take a look here to tell us about
Speaker 1: what everyone's asking chat is.
Speaker 2: Four or four Media's Joseph.
Speaker 3: Cox Joseph, Welcome back to tech stuff.
Speaker 4: Hi, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: Joseph.
Speaker 1: Let's start at the beginning. How is it that one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand chat GPT conversations ended up on Google Search.
Speaker 1: I thought that these conversations were private.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So this starts with an article on Fast Company
Speaker 4: on July thirtieth, and that outlook found that chat GPT
Speaker 4: conversations were being indexed by Google. That is, as your
Speaker 4: listeners will know, Google is constantly going around the web
Speaker 4: and essentially grabbing content from websites. Of course, it can
Speaker 4: use it to make its search engine. What was different
Speaker 4: here was that while ordinarily, when you're talking to chat gpt,
Speaker 4: thankfully all of the content of that conversation is private,
Speaker 4: in this case, what some people have been doing was
Speaker 4: using i think a little known feature where they could
Speaker 4: share the contents of that communication. Now, maybe you want
Speaker 4: to do that because you want to show your friend, wow,
Speaker 4: look at this really wacky, crazy thing that chat GPT
Speaker 4: told me. Or maybe there's a business need right like, hey,
Speaker 4: I've done this with chat GPT, now I need to
Speaker 4: show other people in my team. And you would select
Speaker 4: the share feature and this would create a public essentially
Speaker 4: a public web page version of that chat, and although
Speaker 4: you can then send that to your friends or your
Speaker 4: co workers, it can also be seen by Google obviously,
Speaker 4: and OpenAI probably could have done some stuff to protect
Speaker 4: it there. But the result is that a bunch of
Speaker 4: these conversations and now publicly available, are indexed by Google,
Speaker 4: and I seriously doubt that all of the people using
Speaker 4: this share feature really understood what they were getting into.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can you elaborate on that, because I thinking about WhatsApp,
Speaker 1: for example, where there's like a forward button, or like
Speaker 1: on x, I can do like a share link to tweet.
Speaker 1: Is this like a somebody thinks they're pressing a button
Speaker 1: to share an individual version of the transcript with another person,
Speaker 1: but in so doing is kind of making their whole
Speaker 1: chat GPT history visible to Google. Or what's the practical
Speaker 1: explanation of how this happened?
Speaker 4: Yeah, the users are making that particular conversation publicly available,
Speaker 4: and it works in a very similar way to the
Speaker 4: things you just outlined. I sometimes compare it a little
Speaker 4: bit to a Google doc link where you will go
Speaker 4: and you'll make that public and there's that setting you
Speaker 4: can do that says Hey, anybody with this link is
Speaker 4: going to be able to read your aw full article draft.
Speaker 4: I mean that would be my case or whatever, or
Speaker 4: your private thoughts or whatever. But you don't then go
Speaker 4: and paste that link online and Google take steps so
Speaker 4: that's not included in search engine results. Of course, if
Speaker 4: you want to post it on a forum or you
Speaker 4: post it on Twitter, that's going to be something else.
Speaker 4: But that's usually how I think most people expect this
Speaker 4: sort of sharing behavior to work. They expect that, well,
Speaker 4: I'm going to just share it with one or two
Speaker 4: people or you know, a dozen or whatever. They don't
Speaker 4: expect typically that it's going to be available to anyone
Speaker 4: on the Internet who knows where to look, or of
Speaker 4: course anyone with Google now because Google has archived it
Speaker 4: as well. It's sort of a big mix of the
Speaker 4: user is partly at fault for perhaps not fully understanding
Speaker 4: what is going on. Of course open AI, maybe not
Speaker 4: fully explaining what is going on, and not taking steps
Speaker 4: to stop Google indexing, and then of course Google indexing
Speaker 4: it as well. There's a lot of maybe blame is
Speaker 4: too strong a word, there's love blame to go around,
Speaker 4: I think, to all parties.
Speaker 2: So this is one hundred thousand conversations.
Speaker 1: Do we know how many users those hundred thousand conversations represent?
Speaker 1: And also you know what are some of the things
Speaker 1: in those conversations.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think I've seen figures that drill down
Speaker 4: to how many users, but you're right, it's nearly one
Speaker 4: hundred thousand conversations with this data set the researcher scraped
Speaker 4: from Google. I mean, before this, some researchers were going
Speaker 4: through hundreds of conversations and that was already bad enough,
Speaker 4: and of course Newsworthy. Well, this researcher did was scrape
Speaker 4: them on mass put them into a data set. And
Speaker 4: I'm actually looking at it now and there's a lot
Speaker 4: of benign stuff in here. It looks like somebody is
Speaker 4: making their first iPhone app and they're using chat GPT
Speaker 4: for that. There are others where people are clearly discussing
Speaker 4: sensitive business materials, such as could you help me write
Speaker 4: this contract? There is potentially, you know, some bank information
Speaker 4: in here. I say potentially because it sure looks like
Speaker 4: bank information. And then you have I mean you mentioned
Speaker 4: at the top these sort of delusional conversation that some
Speaker 4: people have with chatjeput and I'm sure there is some
Speaker 4: of that in here. I have seen some people talking
Speaker 4: about therapy. I have seen some people talking about relationship issues,
Speaker 4: such as one it seems to be a man talking
Speaker 4: about his ex girlfriend and wondering why she's not looking
Speaker 4: at his Instagram stories, that sort of thing, which I
Speaker 4: don't know if I would turn.
Speaker 2: It's just not that into you.
Speaker 4: That means yes, I think chat GPT was trying to
Speaker 4: say that basically, so this is only what people have
Speaker 4: decided to share, which is a very interesting caveat to
Speaker 4: the data.
Speaker 1: They don't want to share it with the world, but
Speaker 1: they've chosen at least one other person to share it with,
Speaker 1: so therefore, by definition, is not their most private use case.
Speaker 4: Yes, and maybe the research or others will be able
Speaker 4: to do some sort of deeper analysis on this than me.
Speaker 4: But that's interesting and that what are the sorts of
Speaker 4: things that people are willing to share with another person?
Speaker 4: And of course, you know, what does that tell us
Speaker 4: about the things they're not sharing. That being said, I
Speaker 4: don't think anybody wants a security issue where we're actually
Speaker 4: able to see all of that private data either.
Speaker 3: So this was something that was reported out a few
Speaker 3: weeks ago, As you said, has there been any change
Speaker 3: and how did open ai respond to the exclusive.
Speaker 4: So open ai has now disabled this like opt in
Speaker 4: sharing feature because the company actually said they don't think
Speaker 4: people fully understood what was going on. And then the
Speaker 4: company also says it is working with Google to remove
Speaker 4: some of those indexed results. Because of course there's a
Speaker 4: few things going on here. There's the exposure in the
Speaker 4: first place, there's the sharing, there's the indexing by Google.
Speaker 4: But even if Google does remove these search results, these
Speaker 4: chats have been archived by this researcher, and I presume
Speaker 4: others as well, Like I seriously doubt there's only one
Speaker 4: or two people who grabbed all of this data. It's
Speaker 4: very much an interesting privacy issue that I think researchers
Speaker 4: want to look into and learn from.
Speaker 3: I don't understand why open ai seem to think that
Speaker 3: this tool would be useful, Like, have you given that
Speaker 3: any thought?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that people do want to sometimes share
Speaker 4: the interesting or crazy or insightful stuff they get from GPT. Now,
Speaker 4: open ai probably should have taken steps to ensure that
Speaker 4: people can share this in a much more private manner,
Speaker 4: maybe something like you have to add a particular chat
Speaker 4: GPT user to the conversation, then they can see it
Speaker 4: in the same way you add somebody to a Google doc,
Speaker 4: for example. That would be a little bit more laborious,
Speaker 4: there'd be a bit more friction there. But I'm just
Speaker 4: interested in why open ai did not take more steps
Speaker 4: to protect this from being scraped by Google. It is
Speaker 4: possible to share material online without it being touched by
Speaker 4: search engines. You can ask search engines, hey, if you
Speaker 4: come across this, please do not index it. I'm curious
Speaker 4: why OpenAI did not take those steps, and I don't
Speaker 4: have any insight either way. But the result is that
Speaker 4: all of these chats have now been indexed on Google,
Speaker 4: and I think that's pretty significant.
Speaker 2: What do you think might happen next?
Speaker 4: What happens next is that I think other companies are
Speaker 4: going to start checking whether they also have similar issues
Speaker 4: like this. And I do want to stress like, this
Speaker 4: is not the vast majority of chat GPT conversations or
Speaker 4: anything like that. Chat GPT was not hacked, it wasn't breached.
Speaker 4: There was a somewhat niche security issue, but because these
Speaker 4: tools are becoming so so popular now, even a relatively
Speaker 4: niche issue can actually impact a ton of people.
Speaker 3: After the break, So how secure are AI chatbots stay
Speaker 3: with us?
Speaker 1: It's interesting because Sam Altman was recently on THEO Vonn's
Speaker 1: podcast and he was sort of pointing out some of
Speaker 1: the risks to my surprise, about the privacy issues in
Speaker 1: chat shept. He was saying, like therapists conversations are protected
Speaker 1: by hippa lawyer conversations are protected by attorney client privilege,
Speaker 1: and people assume that when they're talking with chat that
Speaker 1: maybe some of these protections apply, whereas in fact they don't.
Speaker 1: And I was kind of wondering why he, of all people,
Speaker 1: was out there on this topic. I did read some
Speaker 1: other reporting saying that it may be part of the
Speaker 1: lawsuit with the New York Times. The New York Times
Speaker 1: is part of their discovery in the lawsuit against open
Speaker 1: Ai for copyright infringement. Are demanding I think one hundred
Speaker 1: million open ai converse stations for analysis, But I was
Speaker 1: surprised to hear Altman out there on this. Nonetheless, can
Speaker 1: you kind of take a step back and maybe reflect
Speaker 1: on this story about the breach in the broader context
Speaker 1: of how people are using chatbots and what chatbot makers
Speaker 1: are incentivized to do or not do to protect their users.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I haven't seen those comments. But to zoom
Speaker 4: out a little bit, Altman and other people in the space,
Speaker 4: they enjoy kind of getting their cake and eating it too,
Speaker 4: where on one side they will warn about the dangers
Speaker 4: of AI. They'll say it needs to be regulated, it
Speaker 4: needs to be taken really very seriously, and also it
Speaker 4: is coming and there's nothing we can do about it,
Speaker 4: while also building those tools at the same time and
Speaker 4: making a lot of money from it. They actually benefit
Speaker 4: from being on both sides of the conversation at the
Speaker 4: same time, and Oltman and others very easily switch between
Speaker 4: those positions depending on the context and which they're talking about.
Speaker 4: So of course, you know, an AI developer can say
Speaker 4: very very sensitive stuff is going on here and people
Speaker 4: need to be careful, and then on the other side
Speaker 4: they'll say, while our technology is absolutely suitable for that
Speaker 4: because we take privacy very seriously or whatever. I've just
Speaker 4: kind of got a little bit jaded by all of
Speaker 4: these companies playing both sides at the same time, And
Speaker 4: that's why I think you need outside journalists, outside experts, policymakers,
Speaker 4: activists who can probe it a little bit more because
Speaker 4: every time I hear Oltmann or someone similar make these
Speaker 4: points about their own technology, I have to remember, yeah,
Speaker 4: but they're making it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Open ai is apparently trying to remove the shared content
Speaker 3: from search engines, but smart people like this researcher accessed
Speaker 3: and stored it while it was live. While they're using
Speaker 3: it for an altruistic purpose. I'm wondering if you think
Speaker 3: people should be concerned, like what if they do end
Speaker 3: up in the wrong hands.
Speaker 4: I don't think people need to necessarily be concerned about
Speaker 4: this specific breach. I mean that being said, maybe there's
Speaker 4: something really really bad in there and I simply haven't
Speaker 4: seen it, and the researcher and others are going to
Speaker 4: continue to dig through it. But people should absolutely be
Speaker 4: careful with how they are using chatbots. I mean, maybe
Speaker 4: they use this now disabled feature and maybe they're going
Speaker 4: to be concerned about that. But putting that aside, you
Speaker 4: have to remember every single command, every single prompt, every
Speaker 4: single sentence that you put into chatch, GPT or any
Speaker 4: of these other ones. It is going somewhere. It's not
Speaker 4: just sat on your computer. It's not being locally processed.
Speaker 4: Is going off to their systems, and ultimately you don't
Speaker 4: really know what it's being used for. That is, maybe
Speaker 4: it's you retraining and improving the training of the system itself,
Speaker 4: or whether there's some sort of quirk in its security
Speaker 4: or privacy or sharing settings that ends up with it
Speaker 4: now being publicly available. And I know that I'm a
Speaker 4: little bit more extreme than others, but I would never
Speaker 4: put sensitive information into one of these things. And I
Speaker 4: know that plenty of companies are having to implement policies
Speaker 4: where they tell employees, please do not put competential information
Speaker 4: into the chatbot that we don't own. I think people
Speaker 4: just have to be really, really cognizant of that. In
Speaker 4: the same way that when we all first got smartphones,
Speaker 4: we had to learn, oh, right, it's tracking my location
Speaker 4: data if I turn location data on. I think we
Speaker 4: need to remember and to learn, oh, when I put
Speaker 4: this thing into chat GPT, I don't know exactly where
Speaker 4: it's going, and it could potentially bite me later if
Speaker 4: I'm not careful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think it's an important point.
Speaker 1: Just we think about the stakes of the you know,
Speaker 1: open AI or chatchbt logs being indexed and available on
Speaker 1: Google because like information that you know, you share with
Speaker 1: a chatbot that you may think is more or less harmless,
Speaker 1: could have you know, identifying information or sensitive personal information
Speaker 1: about addresses or accouncilor whatever it may be.
Speaker 2: And so I think there's this kind of almost.
Speaker 1: Willful ignorance which many of us, including me, persist with
Speaker 1: despite knowing better in terms of how important proper security
Speaker 1: practices around digital information are. And as you say, like
Speaker 1: with all of a sudden standing on the doorstep of
Speaker 1: a much more scary reality.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would say that with security you really have
Speaker 4: to be proactive rather than reactive after something has happened,
Speaker 4: you know, your bank account got broken into or anything
Speaker 4: like that. Sure, you can deal with it, but it's
Speaker 4: going to be annoying, it's going to be hard, it's
Speaker 4: going to be tricky, and maybe some people steal some
Speaker 4: money from you, maybe somebody hacks into your company or
Speaker 4: something like that. You really should do security proactively if
Speaker 4: you can. And a really thing that applies to everybody,
Speaker 4: which isn't to say that it should be on users
Speaker 4: all of the time. It really is up to the
Speaker 4: people who make these products such as chat, GPT by
Speaker 4: open Ai or whatever else for them to put in
Speaker 4: these guardrails so people can't make these mistakes in the
Speaker 4: first place.
Speaker 3: You were lucky enough to get a hold of this
Speaker 3: data set by this researcher. Do you know what the
Speaker 3: researcher is planning to do with the information.
Speaker 4: Not specifically beyond analyzing it for trends. I believe seeing
Speaker 4: what is in there absolutely no criminal activity or anything
Speaker 4: like that. But again, that's not to say that other
Speaker 4: people may not be doing that as well. I can
Speaker 4: imagine the situation which let's say, and this is a hypothetical,
Speaker 4: but I'm sure I can find something that would reflect
Speaker 4: this in some sort of data set. They're say you
Speaker 4: were using Chatchuputi or something similar to make a quick
Speaker 4: prototype app for your company. In that you include your
Speaker 4: username and password and access keys for the infrastructure of
Speaker 4: your company to make that app. It's all well and good,
Speaker 4: it works, and it accidentally gets shared in a database
Speaker 4: like this, Someone who is malicious could then go in, well,
Speaker 4: thank you very much for those access keys. I'm now
Speaker 4: going to break into XYZ company. And although we haven't
Speaker 4: seen that happen specifically with this data set, that sort
Speaker 4: of stuff happens constantly where you know, an engineer company,
Speaker 4: even a very junior one, will put those keys in
Speaker 4: code which is accidentally exposed online. It's accidentally publicly available,
Speaker 4: and that's how we end up with data breaches.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, I mean as AI is being marketed as
Speaker 1: a tool for work, obviously, the leverage like an individual
Speaker 1: consumer has versus Open Ai or Google is really limited, right,
Speaker 1: Like you know, I can complain and holler and post
Speaker 1: on Reddit, and journalists like you can pick it up.
Speaker 1: But when you know, PEPSI or Ernst and Young has
Speaker 1: concerns about how its employees chats are being handled by
Speaker 1: third party companies that perhaps you know, can can drive
Speaker 1: change more rapidly, given these are like big corporate spenders.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious do you know anything about what the
Speaker 1: conversation alike but kind of B to B conversations around
Speaker 1: operational security for NLMs, Well, I.
Speaker 4: Mean I would also draw a parallel even just with
Speaker 4: the intellectual property one, where a lot of these companies
Speaker 4: weren't really paying attention until somebody was taking Mickey Mouse
Speaker 4: doing some very strange things with AI with it for example.
Speaker 4: And now of course we have the lawsuit you know
Speaker 4: between Disney and mid Journey, for example, which is an
Speaker 4: AI image generator engine. When it comes to security, I
Speaker 4: don't know about the specific conversations, but it's absolutely something
Speaker 4: that people need to be educated at inside their companies.
Speaker 4: Funny enough about Disney, there was a breach of Disney
Speaker 4: I think a year ago at this point, and that
Speaker 4: started because one of their employees downloaded the piece of
Speaker 4: software that they believed was some sort of AI agent
Speaker 4: or some sort of AI generation tool. Hidden inside that
Speaker 4: was malware which then stole passwords, and which then logged
Speaker 4: into Disney's slack and stole a mountain of data. And
Speaker 4: it turns out the hacker behind this had been deliberately
Speaker 4: putting malware into their own custom AI tools to try
Speaker 4: to get unsuspecting people to download it. So this is
Speaker 4: a real threare to anybody working I think in any
Speaker 4: sort of company. Hackers do not care really who you are.
Speaker 4: They only care what you may or may not have
Speaker 4: access to, and AI is just another consideration of that,
Speaker 4: whether that's the data that an employee is inversely putting
Speaker 4: into chat, GPT or a sketchy tool that someone may download.
Speaker 4: You know, like, this is something that we have to
Speaker 4: live with now.
Speaker 2: Joseph, thank you, Thank you, Joseph, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: For Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm care and I'm os Valoshin. This episode was produced
Speaker 1: by Eliza Dennis and Tyler Hill. It was executive produced
Speaker 1: by me Karroen Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and
Speaker 1: Katrin norvelfa I Heart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed this episode
Speaker 1: and Kyle Murdoch rodel theme song.
Speaker 3: Join us on Friday for the weekend tech Ars and
Speaker 3: I will run through the tech headlines you may have missed.
Speaker 1: And please do rate and review the show wherever you
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