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A Lawsuit Claims OpenAI Stole ‘Massive Amounts of Personal Data,’ Including Medical Records and Information About Children, to Train ChatGPT
OpenAI stole “massive amounts of personal data” to train ChatGPT, a lawsuit alleges. The proposed class-action suit claims that Sam Altman’s company “secretly” harvested data to train its large language models so that its chatbot could replicate human language.
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI crawled the web to amass huge amounts of data, including vast quantities taken from social media sites. OpenAI’s proprietary AI corpus of personal data, WebText2, for example, scraped huge amounts of data from Reddit posts and the websites they linked to, the lawsuit claims.
The data accessed included “private information and private conversations, medical data, information about children — essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it could take — without notice to the owners or users of such data, much less with anyone’s permission,” per the lawsuit.
This amounted to “the negligent and otherwise illegal theft of personal data of millions of Americans who do not even use AI tools,” the lawsuit claims.
As well as OpenAI, major backer Microsoft was named as a defendant.
Gen Zers Report Highest Negative Impact From Social Media, Nonprofits Working to Change That
It’s no secret that people 25 and under, also known as Gen Zers, spend the most time on social media, and a McKinsey Health Institute study shows that higher use of social media coincides with poorer well-being.
The McKinsey study shows 35% of young people around the world say they spend more than two hours a day scrolling on social media.
“Embarrassingly, I spend probably six hours on average on my phone,” said 20-year-old Abigail Bettow, adding that her favorite app is TikTok, then Instagram.
People across generations report more positive than negative impacts of social media, but when it comes to Gen Zers, 27% report a negative impact, which is more than any other generation. The study found most of the negativity revolves around the fear of missing out, body image and self-confidence.
Airport of the Future: A Seamless, High-Tech Urban Oasis
Airports are slated to become more seamless and efficient, a new report finds, even as they get busier and larger to meet growing demand.
What’s happening: A passenger experience “revolution” is coming over the next decade, according to a new report by the Oliver Wyman Forum, the research arm of the global consulting company by the same name.
What’s next: Many airports are quickly moving toward “touchless” technology using facial recognition, AI, automation and biometric scanners to smooth check-in and security or immigration clearances.
Yes, but: Such a seamless experience would require secure data-sharing across a global travel industry, which could be a big hurdle. “Not everybody will want this seamless, contactless experience if it means sharing their digital identity,” says the study’s lead author, Rana Nawas.
Privacy Fears Dominate Launch of Digital Euro Plan
When the European Commission unveiled draft legislation paving the way for a digital version of the euro, its jitters over how to allay privacy concerns were only too apparent.
“This is not a Big Brother project,” Finance Commissioner Mairead McGuinness told reporters on Wednesday after presenting what, if it becomes a reality, will be a virtual extension of euro banknotes and coins and which will settle payments across the eurozone in seconds.
Supporters say the digital euro goes beyond providing a public good and will ensure the currency and European Central Bank remain relevant in a digital economy, where cryptocurrencies circulate and Big Tech companies dream of printing their own money.
But critics fear it will give governments a way to snoop on buying behavior. At the extreme end, conspiracy theorists portray the digital euro as a covert plan to phase out cash and monitor people’s shopping habits.
BlackRock Joins AI Mania, Calling It a Potential ‘Mega Force’
BlackRock Inc. is betting on the AI boom as it latches onto the promise of productivity gains from artificial intelligence.
The world’s largest asset manager has just introduced a bullish call on the theme, following a blistering AI-powered rally that’s already driven the best-ever first half of a year for the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index. It picked out semiconductor makers, companies with vast sets of data or high potential for automation as those most likely to benefit.
“We implement an overweight to AI as a mega force,” BlackRock’s research arm said in its midyear report published June 28. “New AI tools could analyze and unlock the value of the data gold mine some companies may be sitting on.”
Meta Releases Clues on How AI Is Used on Facebook and Instagram
As demand for greater transparency in artificial intelligence mounts, Meta released tools and information Thursday aimed at helping users understand how AI influences what they see on its apps.
The social media giant introduced nearly two dozen explainers focused on various features of its platforms, such as Instagram Stories and Facebook’s news feed. These describe how Meta selects what content to recommend to users.
The description and disclosures came in the face of looming legislation around the world that may soon impose concrete disclosure requirements on companies that use AI technology.
Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, tied the company’s new disclosures to a global debate about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence that range from the spread of misinformation to a rise in AI-enabled fraud and scams.
Pornhub Is Being Accused of Illegal Data Collection
There aren’t many websites bigger than Pornhub. Each month, more than 2 billion people visit the adult site, spending an average of almost eight minutes browsing and watching videos — an eternity in internet time. All that activity has the potential to generate huge volumes of data. Now Pornhub is facing a series of legal challenges across Europe over the information it collects.
Activists and researchers are filing a complaint today against Pornhub in Italy that claims the company is “illegally” handling the data of millions of people. The complaint — which is based on a technical analysis of the website and its privacy practices and builds upon previously unreported complaints in the country and in Cyprus, where Pornhub is legally based in Europe — alleges that the company falls foul of Europe’s strict GDPR rules, which govern how people’s data can and should be used.
Pornhub doesn’t allow people to easily opt out of being tracked by cookies; the site isn’t clear about the data it shares with third parties; and its algorithm “assigns” people sexual preferences, based on the videos they watch, says Alessandro Polidoro, a digital rights activist and the lead attorney of the litigation.
Polidoro is representing #StopDataPorn, a collective that includes researchers and civil liberties organizations involved in the action. Polidoro spoke with WIRED about the legal complaints but did not disclose the text, due to the privacy of individuals involved.
Chinese Spy Balloon Was Equipped With U.S. Tech, WSJ Says
Days after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held high-level talks in China with President Xi Jinping that turned out to be a bust after President Biden, who should quite honestly be in a nursing home, called Xi a “dictator,” The Wall Street Journal published a piece, citing what it does best: anonymous sources, which detailed the Chinese spy balloon that the Biden administration allowed to float over the U.S. earlier this year was equipped with American-made equipment.
On Wednesday, WSJ revealed an analysis by U.S. defense and intelligence agencies of the debris recovered from the spy balloon shot down by a stealth fighter jet off the South Carolina coast in February was equipped with commercially available U.S. equipment, some of which could easily be purchased online.
The U.S.-made equipment was “interspersed with more specialized Chinese sensors and other equipment to collect photos, video, and other information to transmit to China,” officials told WSJ. The conclusion of the analysis disproves China’s claim the balloon was for ‘meteorological-puproses‘ and intended for intelligence gathering.
One of the officials said the Biden administration has not publicly shared its findings on the balloon and what components were used from the U.S. What’s still a mystery, and perhaps why some members of Congress are pressuring the administration to release critical information about the balloon’s capabilities, is why Biden allowed the spy balloon to fly over several sensitive U.S. military sites.
