Nearly Half of Firms Are Drafting Policies on ChatGPT Use
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It's obvious because their writings in Confluence and late night e-mails suddenly became very verbose and used the sometimes obvious ChatGPT voice. There's a stark contrast between content they write/share on the spot or discuss in meetings.
Then you get them into a meeting to explain further and they some times can't even remember what they were thinking when they wrote various bullet points.
It's eye opening to see how much the ChatGPT produced content can fool managers at the top who catch glimpses of neatly composed and verbose documents. Then you get the people into meetings and they don't really know where they were going with their "own" documents.
It wouldn't be a problem if they could take the documents as some sort of next step for their learning or research, but it's really becoming useless to have all of this ChatGPT-created content out there where none of them can really execute on it without going back to ChatGPT over and over again to come up with more content.
Goodhart's law in action. If "neatly composed and verbose documents" is the metric higher ups use to judge product managers, then documents will become neater and more verbose to the detriment of everything else.
In the end, the alignment problems that plague AI safety research are all playing out in company structures every day. It's hard to give a metric that measures your intended outcome, and any proxy leads to unintended consequences once there's an easier way to reach that proxy.
I've actually pointed this out as a fallacy of the premise of current alignment theory. That being we simply need to apply humanities values for the AI to be properly aligned. However, every alignment problem can also be seen as an existing human problem for which we have never resolved.
Oil, plastic, electricity, natural gas, mines, wood, poultry, meat & fish, transportation etc. They're nice and super useful and when used in moderation or when there aren't that many humans to begin with and you can easily absorb the consequences. But if you multiply the number of people while at the same time you increase the consumption/production on some or even all of these in tandem the effects are massively compounding.
We want AI to reason like humans and have humanities values. According alignment theory. Yet humans will also cheat to get a result. Our values also are what put us in conflict with each other.
FYI, I've elaborated in much more detail here on such issues with containment/alignment - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap
Yes yes yes holy crap yes.
Corporations are AI, and we are already in the AI apocalypse. Corporations exhibit emergent behavior that any individual human involved with them is powerless to stop, and they self-optimize towards inhuman goals. Coca Cola inc is a paperclip maximizer, except it maximizes the consumption of flavored sugar water. We are completely failing as a society to adequately rein them in.
It's scary how many of the things that are in that movie as caricatures you can now find IRL.
> The problem isn't thinking machines, it's letting machines do the thinking for you
...and then I like to point out that many of our social structures (including corporations) are, essentially, machines. They're just machines running on meat instead of silicon.
I'd be worried about false accusations of this. Some people are much better at communicating in writing, when they have time to think about how to word things, and not so good when put on the spot in a meeting. Others might be better at communicating verbally, and perhaps too verbose in written communication.
However, when the junior product managers are proposing things with terms they don't even understand then something is clearly wrong. Imagine joining a meeting where a product manager is trying to explain their own document but can't understand what "they" wrote when they get to various bullet points. Or the document is correct, but their understanding of their own document is incorrect.
Have you ever seen a student caught cheating? Someone who has the right answers on the paper, but can't explain why or remember why they wrote it down? It's exactly that.
Let's take that to the next step - what happens if ChatGPT happens to get trained on something that is copyrightable - then a prompt script can be used to reproduce the original - does that mean the original is now considered not protected by copyright?
This is a lot more murky than "show me the prompts/parameters" and it's not protected by copyright.
If a copyright precedes the existence of a model, the model was trained on that code and someone distributes code from the model that is a near-verbatim reproduction, that's a different story (in large part because getting that near verbatim reproduction would probably require willful intent rather than just being accidental)
Just out of curiosity.
I don’t think the owner of the copyright loses copyright simply because something else output a copy of his work. Maybe it is “generated” but the copyright holder still has his rights per copyright statutes and you would still be violating those rights by distributing your own copies from the AI output.
Another way of thinking of it is compressed knowledge, with learned structure, and an ability to pick likely words to describe that structure rather than an ability to use original words.
The compression ratio of the source corpus versus the model demonstrates it doesn't have all the source material, ipso facto, results are not infringement.
As an easy to understand analog, if you grab a Shutterstock photo, change it from 100% quality to 5% quality, the file size drops to 100th of the original and on display, none of the pixels are the same. While it may be the same general concept depicted badly, it is certainly not the original and clearly isn't copyrightable.
(Note: That last paragraph is firmly tongue in cheek /s ... I've used the "uniqueness (originality) is compressed out, what remains as learned is fair use" argument in the past, but on further reflection about the interaction of creativity and structure, I'm not sure it stands, especially at temperature 0 aka zero creativity.)
If a human didn't create it, it can't have a copyright.
I draw an image. I write some lines of code that draws an image. I write many lines of code that do something, gather something, and then draws an image?
I just wonder how one can reasonably draw hard lines (and now I don't mean art :D) in the future.. there are so many ridiculous incarnations of copyright and patent fights already out there..
In the context of using AI or coding, the question is how much creative control you have over the output. When writing code to draw an image pixel by pixel, then you have full control, probably even for procedural art when you devised the algorithm completely on your own. When using an existing library that can draw crayon strokes or produce nice water color fills, there is less attributable to your own creativity. Similar for AI, where it will have to be assessed how much of the creativity is attributable to the human-invented prompting (likely not much) vs. to the AI.
There are lots of instances of fairly fragile architectures that work really well in a particular application, but if you change some small part of that architecture, they fail. Now say I spend a lot of research time identifying that architecture and maybe even patent it as a process. I could even publish the methods of exactly what that process entails and somebody could copy it an use it. But I think that would be illegal (assuming AI can be patented in this way).
Training an ML model doesn't seem to fall under the established exceptions which qualify as "fair use".
Given most of what we are talking about would fall under the output being used commercially, lets look at the end of of fair use test.
> the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
>the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Unless your opponent is using a model exclusively trained on Twilight to output a Twilight sequel before you the author, you are going to have a have a hard time saying they used a large part of your work and that it directly displaces a sale of your work.
A collage of word samples from millions of works is going to fall under fair use. If the model did a good enough job of compressing your work in its entirety, and it outputs that copy, you might have a case.
> The compression ratio of the source corpus versus the model demonstrates it doesn't have all the source material, ipso facto, results are not infringement.
What?! This is not at all how copyright law works and that's also not at all how LLMs or compression work! You're wrong about both the law and the technology!
Just because the model can't losslessly reproduce the entire training dataset doesn't mean that the model can't losslessly reproduce copyrightable fragments of the training dataset.
And the law truly doesn't give a damn that a verbatim copy of a piece of code or sequence of paragraphs came out of a model instead of a copy/paste from github. If it's the same basket of bits, or close enough in certain cases, it's covered by copyright, full stop.
> As an easy to understand analog, if you grab a Shutterstock photo, change it from 100% quality to 5% quality, the file size drops to 100th of the original and on display, none of the pixels are the same. While it may be the same general concept depicted badly, it is certainly not the original and clearly isn't copyrightable.
As an easier to understand analog, if you grab a BITMAP of a Shutterstock photo and convert the file type to a reasonable JPEG (lossy compression!!!), tht's very clearly still covered by the copyright on the .bmp.
Firmly tongue in cheek sarcasm, as in, this is obviously wrong.
Or, why making and redistributing a JPEG of a copyright-protected artwork is not infringement.
Results decidedly not guaranteed if you try this “a copy with lossy compression is not infringement” argument in an actual court of law.
You've replied in the spirit intended. :-)
OpenAI ToS 3(a):
"OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output. This means you can use Content for any purpose, including commercial purposes such as sale or publication, if you comply with these Terms."
Is anyone else interested in something like this?
Albeit, it is using proprietary GPT instead.
In other news - Nearly half of firms doing nothing about ChatGPT use.
And before you object, break your hands and try to live with speech recognition as it stands today. Then you will grab onto things like copilot as a lifesaver.
It's the same rhetoric they use to try to push for backdoor in OSes, messaging services, &c. "but what about the pedophiles, think of the children!"
That is a LOT to ask me to do before objecting. I'm pretty good at imagination, so I'll probably skip that step.
This is somewhere between "intentionally misleading" and "objectively false" as people with physical disabilities are already able to work in software development.
> speech recognition as it stands today
...is somewhat clunky and slower than typing, but still usable. The limiting factor for software engineering is not and has never been how fast you can physically enter code.
To put this into context, this entire comment took me about three or four minutes to dictate. At my preinjury typing speed, it would've been done in under one, likely in under half of one.
The options for operating systems that are not Windows are limited and of typical hobbyist quality, but honestly the paid options on Windows are not that much better.
The only maliciousness here is the extremely manipulative nature of your comment. "Somewhat clunky" is absolutely a valid way of describing the productivity impact of current voice transcription systems, and your incredible, emotionally-manipulative hyperbole is solely meant to push an agenda.
> Voice input, when it is the only means of interacting with the computer, fucking sucks.
Yes, because the current paradigm for computers (which involves either a touchscreen or keyboard and mouse, and certain ontological constructs best represented using text-adjacent symbols) is intrinsically better suited to use by people who can use their hands. You can't fix this for the current design of computers. Can it be made better? Sure. Will there ever be parity between users who can use hands and those constrained to voice? Not for computers as we know them - and Copilot won't change that.
> An extremely conservative estimate would be a 10 X productivity impact for anything that requires precision keyboard input, such as programming.
Most time spent programming is spent thinking, not typing. I do not believe your estimate.
> To put this into context, this entire comment took me about three or four minutes to dictate.
I read your comment in a normal conversational rate in under 45 seconds. If we add in another fifteen seconds to correct a few errors using a well-designed (but contemporary, non-Copilot, non-LLM) transcription tool, that's a full minute, far below your "three or four minutes" estimate - so, your complaints are about the clunkiness of current voice-transcription tools, and completely unrelated to the topic at hand, which is Copilot.
> At my preinjury typing speed, it would've been done in under one, likely in under half of one.
There are 128 words in your comment. If you typed that in one minute, you would have a rate of 128wpm, which is faster than anyone I know, and in the 99.9th percentile of typists. If you typed that in thirty seconds, that's 256 wpm. I literally do not believe you can type that fast.
You're intentionally skewing the above numbers to support your point - not that it matters anyway, because again, most time programming is not spent typing.
It’s absolutely the right thing to consider, just as social media rose organizations drafter social media policies.
Anyways, this is ridiculous: What's their selection? I'd argue that 99% of firms world wide are not drafting policies on ChatGPT use. Gartner probably only asked HR and marketing busybodies who feel like they need a public opinion on any topic they are ever asked about to make it look like they are valuable, smart and active "thought leaders".
Until people with absolutely no notion of security and privacy start leaking API keys, internal memos, &c. to openai
It probably already happened, it happens all the time in other tools, but the scale of it and the way it's sold to the public makes it much more likely to be an issue
OpenAI aren't training new models on raw input to their bots (they're using it for other levels of improvement).
Are you worried that an OpenAI employee might steal API keys out of their logs?
(I still wouldn't paste an API key in myself.)
It doesn't seem "ridiculous" to me that companies issue official statements and guidelines about what they want/not want their employees to share with a third party software. Tech illiterate people have absolutely no idea what is ok or not to share and what/where their data go.
Best not to leave it to the users to try to figure out which ones do and don't. They already post secrets to StackOverflow and Github.
Not all about API keys either. Think of it like the new confession booth, and AI is the new priest. Lots of valuable intelligence is run through them.
It's too soon to see these boundaries fail, but they're supposed to be the "safe" option for this.
I also can’t paste anything in ChatGPT window, there are at least 3 spying/tracking software pieces on my work computers. I will comply.
This doesn't matter in roles that are complementary to where the most value is generated (the phrase "commoditize your complement" exists for a reason) but that's not all roles.
* Rendering invalid any attempts to assert intellectual property (trade secrets, patents).
* Destroying attorney-client privilege
* Violating consumer privacy laws
* In some other sectors, you may have even stronger no-data-sharing laws that get violated (e.g., HIPAA, FERPA).
I suspect your company's policy is based on legal concerns such as the above... do you really understand the legal risks of violating your company's policy? Are you really willing to take on all that legal risk personally (the company sure isn't going to protect your ass)?
You need to think about where you're going before you just blindly follow "progress". You're assuming that you'll be better off than the ones left behind, I wouldn't always be so sure.