Caught my coworker training an AI on our internal chat logs without telling anyone

I walked by Dave's desk last Tuesday and saw he had 2000 Slack messages open in a spreadsheet, feeding them into some GPT model. He thought he was building a support bot for our team, but he never asked if people were okay with their DMs being scraped. We had a pretty heated talk about consent and data privacy after that. Has anyone else seen people jump into AI tools at work without thinking through the ethical stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

graym494d ago

I saw a news article about a company that got sued because an employee trained an AI on private chats without telling anyone... it ended up leaking customer info into the bot's responses. Stuff like this is happening way too often now because people see AI as a cool tool and forget it's basically a sponge for everything you feed it. Dave probably thought he was being helpful, but scraping DMs crosses a line unless everyone agrees first. The worst part is once that data goes into a model, you can't really take it back... it's out there forever in some way.

michael_bennett114d ago

Come on @graym49, is it really that big of a deal? If the company didn't want their data used, maybe they should have locked down the chat access instead of leaving it open for anyone to scrape.