Amazon Warns Employees Against Oversharing With ChatGPT

That’s why ChatGPT’s head is so big. It’s full of secrets.

And, possibly, Amazon’s secrets. The tech giant’s wariness with the AI chatbot grew after ChatGPT purportedly almost aced questions typically asked at job interviews for software coders at the company.

Slack transcripts by an Amazon machine-learning engineer, as seen by Insider, revealed that ChatGPT correctly handled software coding questions and gave suggestions on how Amazon’s code could be improved when prompted, with a few “buggy” answers.

One employee commented on Slack that they were “honestly impressed” by the output and was both “scared and excited” about how future coding job interviews might play out.

If you’re still unsure what ChatGPT does and why everyone is talking about it, it’s a powerful language-processing model that works similarly to those AI art generators that are all the rage right now—except, instead of churning out images, it creates wholly “original” text works in the format of your liking, such as essays, scripts, and recipes.

We say “original” in quotation marks because, although no two ChatGPT results are alike, the machine is trained on human-composed texts, raising the ethical question of “AIgiarism.” Since becoming publically available in November, ChatGPT has inadvertently been used as a cheating tool for students. Many schools are also banning the tool.

ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, a key competitor of Amazon. This month, Microsoft began work to integrate ChatGPT with Bing and its Office suite, as well as rolled out professional ChatGPT access for business cloud users.

An attorney for Amazon has cautioned workers not to share confidential information, including Amazon’s code, with the robot.

The lawyer said keeping internal data close to employees’ chests was important because it could be used as training data for ChatGPT, which could cause output to “include or resemble” confidential material.

[via Gizmodo and Insider, cover photo 154948663 © Andreistanescu | Dreamstime.com]