There's a dev here who is using ChatGPT extensively in his work. The rest of the team is just waiting for him to get caught and fired. Sharing company data with unapproved external entities is very definitely a firing offense.
Unless your company really has nothing to hide, it's easy to accidentally dump a company secret or an API key in a chat session. Of course if everyone is aware of this and constantly careful then you may be OK.
If you're copy pasting API keys or such into ANYTHING, you probably shouldn't be a programmer to begin with.
It's like people who use root account key/secret credentials in their codebase. It's not AWSs fault you got a large bill or got hacked, its because you're dumb.
And if you think that there is no special code then you're wrong.
Lots of code expresses buisness strategy that is a competitive advantage/ sensitive.
My org has done a risk assessment and accepted the risk of using such tools; arguing there is no risk is short sighted.
It literally is exactly that. You don't think the code a business creates is "business data"?
Not my place legally or ethically to share code with 3rd parties that I've been paid to read and write.
Your code is not special, but customers data may be. Also, some companies needs to comply to various certifications, and proven leak of source code that was put into some third party tool may be a reason to revoke such certification. Which can cause a serious financial harm to a given company, as it can lead to ex. losing government clients.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
FWIW I don't think the employee should be fired for this or anything, if anything a company could embrace these new technological advances and provide training on using ChatGPT in a more secure manner(ie don't paste your customer's PII into a prompt, etc...).
With this particular employee, using chatGPT has not increased his productivity or the quality of his work by any noticeable degree.
> I don't think the employee should be fired for this or anything
The problem isn't using the technology. The problem is sharing confidential information with an unapproved entity. That is specifically and clearly spelled out as a firing offense, for pretty obvious reasons.
Even if some people feel that it's an overly tight policy, it's a the stated policy and the company has every right to put and enforce whatever rules it wishes about the use of its own data.
Uploading code to ChatGPT can be done by trainees.
Productivity isn't everything.